Dead Man's Switch
by MMB
Summary: An overheard threat to the Centre, an secret long-hidden within the Centre itself, and a pair of new projects that the Centre has kept carefully hidden from everyone makes for a minefield that not everyone is going to survive. Can Jarod, Miss Parker and her team band together to rescue innocent victims from the evil of not one, but TWO corporations that have no scruples?
1. Chapter 1 - Prologue

**Author's note:** Eight years ago, readers on my private archive were disappointed when I told them I was unable to finish this story - the last I will ever write for The Pretender. Of late, however, my Muse has returned and is enabling me to finish it at last. And so, without further ado...

Enjoy the ride.

Chapter 1 - Prologue

Sam rocked back on his heels and cast his eyes yet once more from his assigned post near the south exit over the crowd of people that had packed the Dover Convention Center ballroom floor. He'd been in that one spot for over two hours now, his feet ached, and he seriously doubted that anybody in their right mind would be even considering crashing the event he and fifty other sweepers watched over so carefully. But, orders were orders; and when orders like these came down from the Tower itself, the cream of the sweeper corps could do nothing but comply.

At the south end of the room, he knew that Willy and his so-called 'elite' group were clustered around Mr. Raines and Lyle. It was, after all, a celebration of their eighth year at the head of the Centre without old Mr. Parker in the way, eight years of a reign of terror that had nearly every reasonable Centre employee wondering whether it was safer to go to work every morning or to step in front of a speeding semi. Secrecy overall had been compounding almost daily, security clearances had been diminishing apace, the nature of the research done in Blue Cove turning ever more bizarre and morale was plummeting.

Sam knew this only because he continued to remain close to the top of the authoritative food chain with his permanent assignment as Miss Parker's personal sweeper; although as time was passing lately, he was noticing that Lyle was beginning to NOT pass along information that Miss Parker needed as the nominal head of Surveillance, Information and Security, otherwise known as SIS. Then again, much of that information was meant for Lyle to use against his twin sister, and the source of that information was most likely the Chairman himself, so being out of the loop was an executive decision. Since the spectacular failure of the effort to recapture Jarod was now standing at eight years and counting, Raines had obviously begun to play favorites, and Miss Parker seemed perfectly happy to NOT be the current beneficiary of his largess. She had survived the first 'contest' and was perfectly capable of holding her own, even with Raines feeding Lyle inside information.

The tall, dark-haired sweeper sniffed and let his eyes pick out his permanent assignment from amidst the crowd of government officials, Triumvirate representatives, military-industrial representatives and top Centre brass. She was, as usual, dressed to kill: stunning in a strapless, sapphire-blue sequined gown that made her sparkle like a slender, illuminated gem amidst the sea of black and white of the tuxedoes that surrounded her. She sipped delicately from her champagne flute and, to all appearances, seemed to be enjoying herself, but Sam knew better. He'd been around her long enough to see the frayed edge to that plastic smile she had pasted on her face, to see the coldness in her gaze that was fatigue and frustration.

His eyes darted about in her immediate vicinity and quickly found those he'd been looking for. Sydney was looking more dapper than usual in his tux, hovering close but not too close to his sapphire-clad colleague and watching over her as usual while seeming to participate fully in a conversation with someone Sam had never met. That vigilance actually made Sam feel better, because he knew deep down that the old psychiatrist would be quick to intervene if anything to do with Miss Parker started getting too intense. Then again, Sydney had been watching her more carefully of late anyway, long before this ridiculous soirée was even in the planning stages, so having him still on watch despite the formalities and crowd wasn't necessarily a good sign.

Broots, however, was finally located over by the buffet table, conversing with a great deal of animation with another of his Computer Technologies colleagues. Sam sniffed; they were probably talking that geeky lingo that computer users seemed to slip into at a moment's notice that nobody else on the face of the earth understood. All that alphabet soup – ISP, DNS, DSL – made for a language that was mostly gibberish. And yet… Yes, there it was! Broots' eyes cast out over the crowd and first touched Sydney and then Miss Parker. The geek was being as watchful as the psychiatrist.

Sam's eyes re-found his boss again. How did she do it, he wondered, keep all those corporate weasels at bay and still have a come-on smile on her face? No doubt her words were that delightfully subtle caustic that she used whenever dealing with Mr. Raines or his latest agenda, words that could keep a man nicely at bay without being totally repulsed. She hated shindigs like these, and he happened to know for a fact that she had actually had the guts to protest the order that had dragged her to this one to Mr. Raines himself. And yet she could put on a show like nobody's business when pressed into involuntary service despite her reasoned arguments. Sam's gaze caressed his boss with pride from across the room, where she'd never think to notice it. His position had its perks, one of which was being privileged to watch her survive and actually come out ahead in this tank filled with corporate sharks.

Then the sweeper's blue eyes darkened dangerously as he watched Willy, the new head sweeper as of last week, head in his direction. He'd never had much time for the dark-skinned bully that never seemed too far separated from Mr. Raines' side; having him for a direct superior of late had been downright infuriating. Willy played favorites with the corps members, and he seemed to now be prizing the Centre's version of political correctness over skill and training. Sam had made his resentment and disagreement with the policy anything but a secret, commenting on it often enough that word was sure to get back to Willy, and he knew that one day he'd hear about his border-line insubordination. But this was in public…

"Take a fifteen-minute break," Willy announced quietly when he'd drawn near enough. "This is going to go on for another three hours or more at least, so you take your break and be back promptly."

"Right." Sam had adopted the practice of giving Willy monosyllabic and monotone answers to his orders mostly out of self defense. If he ever told the man to his face what he REALLY thought of him, there'd be blood flowing somewhere by the end of the evening. Besides, his feet really were starting to ache, what with standing in the same place for all that time; he could use some sit-down time.

Willy twitched a finger, and one of those politically vetted 'elite' sweepers who couldn't shoot or think their way out of a paper bag moved into Sam's position and adopted the typical stance of a sweeper on duty: feet apart, hands hanging at sides, eyes constantly brushing over the crowd. Sam nodded at his relief and headed out the south exit he'd been watching and down the brightly lit and festooned corridor towards the restrooms he knew were not far away. He'd been careful to limit the amount of fluids he'd had before taking up his post at the celebration, but even that little bit had long since had its chance to work its way through his system.

Feeling lighter and far more comfortable everywhere except his feet, Sam spotted a small alcove not far away that had a table, chair, lamp and pay phone, and headed for it. There was no way in Hell that he was going to spend his fifteen – now twelve – minutes of freedom pushing through a crowd of people he not only didn't know but didn't really want to be with. Sighing, he settled into the chair, turned the lamp off so that his position wouldn't be readily noticeable, and relaxed, closed his eyes and let himself drift just a bit. His time sense was on alert status so that he'd head back to the ballroom in exactly eight minutes, but he'd have his break and his rest before then.

From time to time, a set of voices would approach and then dissipate as couples and clumps of guests would make their way to the restrooms or toward the main entrance to the convention center itself. Their presence kept him awake after all; and as his uncanny time sense told him his eight-minutes was almost up, he straightened in the chair and made to rise.

"Are you sure?" came the sound of one rather excited voice from nearby and drawing closer.

"C'mon, tell me you don't think the Centre is ripe for the slaughter after this," was the reply. Sam sank back into his pool of darkness to listen. Something was going on here that he needed to hear…

"What do the others think?" There was a short pause. "You _have_ talked to them, haven't you?"

The second person gave a short, sharp laugh. "They're frankly astonished that nobody's ever seen anything like it before from the Centre. It makes for a window of opportunity that simply can't be ignored. What's more, if we managed to carry this thing off, I'm sure we'll end up with most of the business the Centre's been stealing in our back pockets once again, as well as most of the clients that have always done business with Blue Cove."

"I'm still not sure this is gonna work," the first voice hesitated. "They've got a pretty canny lady at the head of Centre Security. If she twigs to any of this, if we make any moves that make her suspicious, we're dead in the water. Game over."

"That's why we'll just have to make sure that she stays in the dark until it's too late," the second voice insisted darkly. "If she starts to suspect, we'll know because of _where_ she starts to look and _how_ she begins to modify the security there. At that point, she will have become more of a liability than we need, and we'll just take her out of the picture."

"And _that_ won't call attention to what we're doing?" the first voice was astonished.

"Not if it's done right," the second voice shushed at its comrade. "Accidents happen all the time, you know…"

"What about that monster Raines keeps with him – Lyle?"

"You're the one who told me that the Yakuza want his ass in the worst kind of way, now that Sonny Tanaka is dead in prison. Hell, I've been thinking that they'd be the first clients in our pockets if we could give Lyle to them still kickin'." There was a short pause. "No, the one we really have to watch out for is the Parker bitch."

"Why don't we just get rid of her right up front, then?"

"Because the longer we can keep her in the dark, the closer we can get to running Raines and the Centre entirely into the ground before we jerk the rug out from underneath him. Once we have to remove Parker, our hand will be halfway revealed. The risks more than double then."

"I still don't like it." The first voice sounded very skeptical.

"You'll do as you're told," the second voice had a touch of steel will behind it. "Our techs have found a back door into the Centre mainframe, so it's only a matter of time now. You keep your mouth shut, your eyes open, and stay on the job! You're the best one among us to know if they're starting to smell anything fishy. You've been there long enough and have enough seniority…"

"I hate being the insider. I'm ready to come home."

"You just hang tight," the first voice urged tersely. "If all goes as planned, you'll be stuck in the Centre for only a little while longer. But we need to get back before they miss you or come and find us together. No need to cause undue comment before it's necessary…"

Sam rose slowly out of his pool of darkness and stared thoughtfully at the gaping south entrance to the ballroom. He hadn't been able to see many of the features of the men who had just conferred without knowing he was listening, and they had faded quickly into the sea of tuxedos. He shook himself and walked briskly and with determination to the entrance and touched his replacement on the shoulder to indicate that he was back and ready to resume his duty.

"You're late," the sullen blonde sweeper grumbled as he shifted and let Sam take the optimal position that gave him the best view.

"I'm here, aren't I?" Sam grumbled back.

"Asshole," the sweeper tossed over his shoulder as he headed off through the crowd to rejoin his colleagues near Raines.

Sam's eyes sought out the glistening sapphire that was his boss, only now his gaze was troubled. Something was brewing, something that was designed to threaten, if not destroy, the Centre eventually; and the only way for him to protect his boss from near-certain death was to make sure she heard nothing about it. That didn't make sense, he told himself with a quick shake of the head. The more aware of what was going on around her Miss Parker could be, the better she could defend herself…

Against an accident? Against an attack made to look like an accident?

What was he supposed to do? If he uttered a word of what he'd overheard to Miss Parker, there wasn't a doubt in his mind that she'd do exactly as the conspirators had anticipated: she'd begin poking around in things she normally left alone AND she'd begin making adjustments to the Centre security systems. Yet if he kept his mouth shut, and she innocently began to poke around anyway – even if out of sheer boredom – he'd be running the risk of her ending up the victim of an arranged accident.

Who could he tell, then? Certainly not Raines! If it weren't for the fact that the old ghoul's moniker sat on his paycheck every week, he wouldn't care if those men DID rip the Centre out from underneath him. He could always get another job, and no doubt so could Broots and Miss Parker while Sydney could just retire. Tell Lyle? Not a chance in hell. Telling Sydney or Broots was out of the question as well, because in telling them he might as well tell Miss Parker too. Their concern for her welfare would give everything away without the need to utter a word, and then she'd be in danger.

No, it looked as if he was going to have to deal with this conundrum on his own. He had to protect Miss Parker, even from herself, if need be. He'd probably end up regretting it, but he really didn't have any choice.


	2. Chapter 2 - Just a Hint of Trouble

**Author's Note:** From this point on, I will resume a practice I had from my first days in this fandom: I will post the new chapter every week sometime during the day on Saturday. In this way, I keep the feeling of a "series" alive - and make a promise to my readers that they will have new material once a week. I hope this will be okay with you folks. Enjoy!

Chapter 2 – Just a Hint of Trouble

Miss Parker sniffed as she saw her three colleagues – the other parts of her team to recapture Jarod – alighting from the elevator and homing in on her position just outside the etched glass doors that were the Chairman's office at the very top of the Tower. Broots looked his typical nervous and geeky self in his newest incarnation of a "The Centre Recycles" tee shirt and jeans. Dressed a little more conservatively in turtleneck and sports jacket, as befitting a psychiatrist, Sydney's entire being was imbued with curiosity and alertness. Sam, on the other hand, was the quintessential sweeper, with only the expression in his eye betraying his wariness on all of their behalves.

"I though this was going to be a private ass-reaming," Miss Parker commented caustically, her eyes touching first Sydney, then Broots and finally Sam with equal frustration. "I didn't realize I was going to have an audience at my humiliation."

Sydney opened his mouth to reply, but an angry call from the direction of the elevator cut him short. "What the Hell is going on?" demanded Lyle, who stormed up to and into his twin sister's face with an unabashedly threatening attitude. "Why am I being called into _his_ office, and what did you have to do with it?"

"Mr. Lyle, sir?" came a quiet request from behind Lyle.

Miss Parker tried not to snicker when she saw that the three people who made up the rest of Mr. Lyle's retrieval team had apparently also been summoned, just as her team apparently had. Lyle had a second-string team, that was for sure! Corky had been selected as his computer tech, a veritable geek visually with only moderately good programming and hacking skills. Broots could work rings around the man without even breaking a sweat, and _this_ was the man they expected to best Jarod's genius? Then there was the dour Dr. Fischer to play psychoanalyst to anything the team managed to dig up. A quick word with Sydney a few months ago revealed that Dr. Fischer hadn't even _met_ Jarod, and so was working off of those of Sydney's notes that had actually been turned in to the Centre. Only the sweeper, Dick, had any real potential; but that came only because Dick had been a friend of and had been personally trained by Willy, Mr. Raines' pet guard-dog sweeper. All in all, though, Miss Parker had to admit that seeing _them_ just as confused and concerned as she and the rest of her team were feeling made her almost feel better.

"Looks like we're all gonna get whatever ass-reaming Miss P was expecting," the technician leaned and whispered to Sydney, who merely nodded blandly and kept his eyes glued to her face, as the leader of his team. One of these days, she suspected, the psychiatrist would write a paper on the levels to which competition between the two teams, especially considering the other team was headed by her twin, could rise when that competition ended up carried over into adult life and was egged on by a manipulative superior. No doubt she and Lyle had already supplied him with a good deal of research material in the last nine years, and she was equally certain that all of his notes were safely stowed at his house to prevent discovery.

From the intent expression on his face, she could tell that situations like this one, while rare, were deeply appreciated by the old psychiatrist. He probably found it fascinating to watch Lyle and her do their dominance dance; he could take his observations back to his office to analyze the steps later on in the evening. He had clearly focussed his entire attention on the two of them, determined not to miss a single word or nuance. The entire idea was audacious enough to be amusing, especially as she suspected the verdict on Lyle would be less than complimentary.

Her amusement ended as Lyle wrapped a painfully tight hand around her upper arm. "_TELL _me what you're up to!" he snapped.

"I don't know what you're talking about – I didn't have a damned thing to do with this, you moron," Miss Parker hissed lethally in response to his stance. She jerked her arm free and moved even more into his face. "Even if I did, do you honestly think I'd tell _you_?"

"And I'm supposed to believe you?" Lyle asked, his voice cold.

"I honestly don't give a shit what you believe," Miss Parker shrugged, knowing that the gesture would only serve to make her twin angrier, and then stepped back. "Besides, how do I know that it wasn't _you_ who managed to get us all in trouble, and that you're just playing innocent to try to throw me off-track?"

"_Me_?!"

"Where have you been for the last week, o brother of mine?" Miss Parker inquired with a sweetness in her voice that was almost poisonous. "Oh yes – I remember now! You were in Portland – got back just last night, if I remember properly. And isn't that where that Chinese dancer went missing…"

Now it was Lyle's turn to go toe to toe with his sister. "You know damned well what I was doing in Portland – and that I had nothing whatsoever to do with…"

"I know no such thing! I know what you were _supposed_ to be doing, but outside that…"

A voice from right in front of the etched glass doors cleared itself overly loudly, and both Parkers turned to see Willy's towering and dark face looking at them with a small smirk of amusement behind his eyes. "Mr. Raines will see you now," he stated and then turned to nod to the sweepers behind him, who immediately pulled on the matching doors so as to accommodate the six who had been summoned.

Miss Parker turned to once more glance at her despised twin and then strode forward purposefully to push past him, trailing the rest of the assemblage behind her like a Queen on progress. As expected of him, Sam pushed past everyone else so that the burly sweeper could be directly behind Miss Parker as she entered Raines' office, and then he smirked ever so slightly as he faced off against the other security men.

Only Willy, in all of the Centre hierarchy, demonstrated an equal level of dedication to his permanent assignment, and yet Sam managed to do it without any obvious signs of fawning or arrogance. He simply was _there_ all the time, on watch all the time, keeping her safe all of the time he was allowed to be present. Even Lyle didn't have a sweeper with that level of commitment, and it was yet another way in which Miss Parker knew her team to be superior to her brother's.

It didn't take long for the two retrieval teams to line up in front of the massive carved desk that was the hallmark of the Centre Chairmanship, with Miss Parker's team gravitating toward the right and Lyle's team to the left. Both groups clustered together, leaving almost an aisle between them that was as much indicative of the gulf of attitudes as well as the element of competition. Neither side bothered to look at the other anymore; all eyes were on the gaunt figure behind the mammoth desk.

William Raines had shrunk in on himself even more over the five years of his reign at the top of the Centre food-chain, if such a thing were even possible. His skeletal frame was garbed in a very expensive suit that, nevertheless, looked two sizes too big. Sunken blue eyes that glittered with both intelligence and insanity from regarded the group assembled before him with distaste. As usual, when called up on the carpet, Miss Parker's skin crawled to think that she could possible be related to the ghoul.

"I'm sure," Raines began, and then gasped noisily to pull another full breath of pure oxygen through the cannula in his nose, "that you're all wondering why I called you here."

"Whatever gave you that idea?" Miss Parker quipped bitterly, one hand on her hip. Sam merely shifted subtly, his stance becoming just slightly more protective than before.

Mr. Raines gifted her with a withering glare and wheezed in a breath. "Allow me to enlighten you then. It has come to our attention," he continued, and then gasped again, "that there have been an overabundance of unnecessary expenditures from both teams here: trips in Centre jets, hotel bills, restaurant and bar tabs…" He gasped again. "Are you catching my drift now?"

"Certainly you don't expect us to fund the hunt for Jarod out of our own pockets?" Lyle gaped.

"No," Raines answered slowly, and then gasped again, "but neither do I want to be paying for employee vacations with company monies." He picked up two folders, both seemingly adequately filled with documents, and held them out to both Lyle and Miss Parker. "I expect explanations to be filed and on my desk by tomorrow for the items listed here."

"What about them?" Miss Parker jerked a thumb toward the support team members on her side of the aisle. "Why call them in if you just wanted to talk finances with…"

"I wanted you all to hear this." Mr. Raines slowly and carefully arose from his comfortable leather chair to lean both hands on the desk toward the group in front of him. "The Centre is no longer in the business of reimbursing first class accommodations for full retrieval teams or dinners for five or six at four-star restaurants. Reasonable expenses will be handled, outlandish ones will be handed right back to the employee who incurred them. We are not an endless supply of money for lifestyles out of your reach otherwise." Miss Parker had to admit she was impressed – all that time Raines spent in the Renewal Wing and respiration therapy looked as if it were paying off at long last. The gasp at the end of that tirade was long and labored, however, putting things in her world back where they belonged.

"I am assigning an auditor to oversee the finances of both retrieval teams," he continued, "someone who will be receiving your receipts and claims and ruling on them on the spot." There was another noisy breath. "You should be aware that continued abuse of Centre funding will result in consequences that will be… unfortunate… Do I make myself clear?"

"Is that it?" Miss Parker sneered back. "Nothing about how we're chasing ghosts now, nothing about the fact that none of us have had even the hint of a clue as to Jarod's whereabouts for well over five years now, nothing about how maybe the time has come to rethink how to better allocate the resources and personnel? Just a damned lecture about our spending habits?"

"Miss Parker." Raines was obviously exercising patience, something that would be chilling under other circumstances. "I would think the number of times you and your brother have been called to report on your failures should indicate that our concern has not lagged in that respect."

"And just how do you expect us to run a ghost to ground without spending money to do it?" she persisted stubbornly. "We have to court information and pay for it, because intimidation isn't doing the trick anymore…"

"Not in first class hotel rooms, and not at four-star restaurants," Raines intoned as he once more seated himself. "Not unless you're willing to pay for them yourself. Am I making myself clear?"

"C'mon, boys." Miss Parker spun on her stiletto heels and pushed past Sam in heading toward the door. "This is just a tempest in a teapot…" From the corner of her eye, she saw that even Lyle gave a quick jerk of the head to his team and began to turn away at the same time.

"I'm not finished…" Raines' voice sounded hollow and ominous, causing both Parkers to hesitate and turn about again. "The fact of the matter is that the Centre has been bleeding money into this attempt to retrieve Jarod for far too long, and I've decided that the time has come to put an end to it. Assigning an auditor to the retrieval effort is but the first step." He gasped and glared at each of the Parker twins in turn. "Listen, and listen well. You two have one more year in which to try to win a ticket to success here at the Centre before you _and_ your teams are transferred to Africa and put through a thorough re-education process." His intake of breath was positively bloodcurdling. "At that time, the hunt to retrieve Jarod will simply become a termination contract, and we _will_ put Jarod out of our misery, _permanently_. Either way, the expense of hunting for Jarod will end one year from today."

Miss Parker's jaw dropped open, but it was Lyle who broke through his shock first. "Kill him? After all this?"

"Precisely," Raines intoned in an executioner's voice. "One way or another, a year from now, Jarod will no longer pose the kind of threat to the Centre that we've been dealing with all along…"

"Except for the last five years," Miss Parker muttered sotto voce to her teammates. Everyone, from her team to Lyle's and even Raines himself, all knew that Jarod's disappearance had been absolute. He hadn't touched a Centre back account, hacked the email client program or left a single clue to his whereabouts or activities since two fairly short phone calls not long after the incident in Scotland. Evidently five years' worth of being left completely unmolested wasn't enough for Raines.

"The necessary players are in place to simply take him out, but you have a year to pull this iron out of the fire." Raines' voice held a note of satisfaction as he lowered himself back into his chair and arranged the plastic tubing so that his access to the oxygen was unimpeded. "Bring Jarod back to the Centre where he belongs, and the Assistant Chairmanship will be assured to the one who succeeds. Fail, and well…" He drew in an exaggeratedly long and noisy gasp. "It will be the last task you fail at."

Miss Parker and Lyle glanced at each other, and she could see that neither one of them was pleased at the announcement. "Why a year?" Lyle decided to ask the question that had occurred to them both. "If you're that worried, why not just take out the termination contract and…"

"Because that's about the amount of time that the Centre can continue to afford to finance a losing campaign," Raines wheezed noisily. "Despite everything, Jarod alive and back in our control again represents the return of a sizeable investment and profit potential. While we would rather our property be returned, we have to be practical and know when to cut our losses before they swallow us whole." He gasped again. "Of course, each of you will continue to carry out your other official job duties at the same time."

"What?!" Both Miss Parker and Lyle burst out in outrage.

"You…" Raines looked at Miss Parker, "will begin a complete overhaul of the Centre mainframe with an eye to increased security. You…" the blue eyes landed on Lyle, "will review the sweeper/cleaner corps with an eye to streamlining the corps and eliminating deadwood from the roster. You…" he looked first at Sydney and then at Fischer, "each have research projects that need your attention when not directly participating in the retrieval effort. You…" he looked at Broots and Corky, "should be helping your various team members in whatever they require of you."

"How the hell do you expect…" Lyle began, taking a step forward, only to be stopped by Willy stepping forward from the side protectively to face off in a challenge. Miss Parker saw the grimace that filled her twin's face, and she knew her face looked much the same.

"How the hell do you expect us to do the jobs of two people and still be successful at finding Jarod?" she interrupted, asking the question that Lyle was clearly starting.

"That really isn't my concern, is it?" Raines replied caustically. "It's yours – and now you know the consequences of failure at either or both tasks." He then motioned with his hand, as if brushing the entire group aside and out of his consideration. "Now get back to work – and _find Jarod_."

The sweepers at the back of the office swept the doubled glass doors open again, and as Miss Parker turned to leave, she saw Sydney tug at Broots' sleeve and jerk his nose in the direction of the exit. Broots staring to move seemed to unfreeze the rest of the collected members of both teams, who walked in silence from the office. Miss Parker pushed through the group and punched the button to summon the elevator, and then stood facing away from the silvered door with her hands at her waist.

Lyle pushed through the others, just as his sister had, and then faced off with her again. "And just what the hell do you think we're going to do about _that_?" he demanded with an angry gesture toward the glass doors.

Miss Parker looked at him with a mixture of surprise and amusement. "I suggest that we both dig in and work very hard to find Jarod before the other does," she drawled mockingly. "A year can pass by faster than you think."

"We need to pool our resources…" Lyle grabbed her elbow again and tried to turn her aside from the elevator. "If we work together…"

"You'd take the credit all for yourself," Miss Parker hissed, jerking her arm from his grasp as the metal door slid aside. "I'm not doing your work for you, Lyle – I have enough on my plate already with the hunt for Jarod and running SIS – so go brown-nose Raines and see if he'll give you an extension to the time limit." She turned and stepped into the elevator behind her team – twisting and putting out a hand to restrain Lyle or any of his team from getting into the small space with her. "You can start by waiting for the next elevator."

Lyle's mouth worked soundlessly, but the elevator door had already begun to slide across the opening again.

"A year, Miss Parker?" Broots asked, his voice downright fearful. "A year, or we all get a one-way ticket to Africa?"

"Oh shut up and let me think," she responded with a sigh and leaned against the back wall of the elevator. A brief look of surprise flitted across her face as she remembered the folder she'd been handed, and she opened it. "Tell me, boys, when was the last time any of us roomed in a fancy hotel or ate out at a world-class restaurant while on the clock?"

Sydney shook his head slowly. "I don't think we've ever done any of that, Miss Parker," he replied quietly.

"What are you thinking?" Sam asked, his voice filled with quiet determination, "that someone is up to something?"

Miss Parker closed the folder and tapped the smooth manila against her chest thoughtfully. "I'm going to want to go through this very carefully… In the meanwhile…" She shot each of her team members a sharp glance. "Syd, I want you going back through all the crap we've collected from Jarod over the years to see if you can't get an insight from the accumulation that you would have missed looking at it all one piece at a time. We need to find your Science Club experiment, and we need to find him yesterday. Broots, I want you digging through the mainframe. I want a copy of every file mentioning Jarod's name printed out. Sam…"

"My job is to watch your back, Miss Parker," the dark-haired sweeper stated darkly. "I'll just keep doing my job."

There was a metallic ring as the elevator slowed to a halt. "Move it, boys," Miss Parker ordered as the door slid aside again to let them out on SL-17, where Sydney had his Sim Lab and Broots had his small computer lab set up a few doors away. "We confer again at four o'clock." All four of them lifted wrists to check their watches, and then Miss Parker was striding away down the corridor to the office she used on the sublevel when she wanted to be closer to her team. Less than a heartbeat behind her was Sam, easily keeping up with the pace she set.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," Broots mentioned to Sydney, his sotto voce carrying back to her even over the clicking of her heels on the polished cement flooring.

"Since when do we _not_ have a bad feeling about working here, my friend?" Sydney returned in a tired voice. "I'll be in the storeroom, if you need me."

"A _really_ bad feeling about this," Miss Parker muttered to herself and Sam, agreeing with her teammates and, with a glance up and down the corridor to see who might be watching or listening – other than the omnipresent surveillance cameras – pushed open the door and stepped into the darkness of her office. She hadn't asked the others to do anything she wasn't going to be doing herself, and something told her that digging through the Centre mainframe today was going to be a daunting task indeed.

oOoOo

"Gerald O'Brien is here," announced Kristen's soft voice over the telephone.

"Good! Good! Send him in," Raines wheezed and pulled another folder from his In Box, this one quite a bit thicker than those he'd handed to his "children". The glass door opened silently, and he could see Willy nodding a tall and strikingly handsome dark haired man into the office. "Mr. O'Brien," the gaunt Chairman called breathlessly and motioned to a chair that had been moved back into place in front of the massive desk. "Please, sit down."

"It's an honor to meet you, sir," O'Brien leaned over the huge desk and extended his hand to his boss. "It's been a while…"

"Yes, but I can remember the way Les Vickering was talking about you just the other day, in our Financial Planning meeting, and that was what convinced me to call on your expertise." Raines waited until the accountant had found his seat before pulling in another noisy lungful of air. "I've heard about your investigative talents tracing down that kickback scheme in Purchasing and Receiving last quarter. Les estimated that firing those two warehouse managers would save the Centre nearly four hundred thousand dollars this fiscal year alone."

"Thank you, sir." O'Brien's face colored lightly. "Just doing my job, sir."

"Well, I hope those skills of yours are exceptionally keen, because I have a much tougher nut for you to crack for me." Raines pushed the manila folder across the desk.

"For you, sir?" O'Brien's thick dark brows rose on his face. "I'm working directly for you on this, not for Mr. Vicker…"

Raines shook his head violently. "As of this morning, your job title has changed, and you'll be reporting directly to me as your superior. I don't need any other fingers in this particular pot." The skeletal finger pointed. "Take a moment to glance through that; tell me what you see?"

O'Brien opened the folder and stared. Raines knew that, looking up at him from a glossy photograph, would be the strikingly beautiful woman otherwise known around the Centre as the "Ice Queen": old man Parker's daughter herself. He looked back up at Raines. "Miss Parker, sir?"

"Keep reading," Raines directed, a smirk of satisfaction on his face.

Raines watched the face of the younger man as he began flipping through the documents he'd been given. In that folder were eight personnel sheets – one on each of the retrieval team members, including the Parker twins – as well as a list of budgetary irregularities each of them was suspected of perpetrating. Finally O'Brien looked up again. "So you want me to oversee them all?"

"That's right," Raines nodded. "I want to know when each of them buys a box of Kleenex, and I want all receipts and claims forms to go directly to you. You will make an immediate determination of propriety and either forward them to Bookkeeping or, in case of _im_propriety, submit a report to my personal sweeper."

O'Brien frowned. "That's a little irregular in and of itself, isn't it?" he asked, his tone wary.

"The project represented by those eight people has been a financial black hole," Raines exploded and then wheezed. "I want to make sure that the money spent by the Centre is called for and not some extravagance." He pulled in another noisy breath and sat for a moment, trying to calm himself and eventually pulled on his oxygen tank once more. "You will present yourself to both Miss Parker and Mr. Lyle, and you will give each of them one of the copies of the letter of introduction you'll find at the back of that folder." He gasped again. "From that moment on, you will be directly responsible for making sure that the monies used in that project are used appropriately and at a reasonable level."

O'Brien closed the folder, placed it on his lap and put a hand down on the folder gently. "You can count on me, sir."

"Trimming the waste from this project will mean a regular bonus of thirty percent of what you've saved," Raines related with a keen eye to the younger man's face. "Each month that the actual costs of the project are less than the previous years', you'll receive an extra check reflecting that." The blue eyes began to glitter, and Raines gloated silently at finding the man's mercenary vulnerability. "However, if you don't find excesses and trim them, you may find that your employment here will be re-evaluated."

There was a quick flash of alarm and then something that almost looked like anger cross the young man's face, giving Raines reason to feel deep satisfaction. Now this O'Brien character had seen and heard both the carrot and stick that would drive his performance for the next twelve months. He knew what the consequences could be either way.

"Go on now," Raines waved at the accountant. "My sweeper will have information as to the precise location of both Miss Parker and Mr. Lyle for you when you're ready to make their acquaintance. I suggest you not wait too long for that to take place."

"I won't," O'Brien stressed and rose to his feet. "And thank you, sir, for the confidence you've place in me…"

"See to it that it wasn't misplaced," Raines warned and nodded, and then very deliberately opened yet another folder on his desk and began to read. A more clear sign of dismissal couldn't be made.

It wasn't until the glass door closed behind the young accountant that Raines looked up again and then turned to stare out the glass window behind him at the expanse of manicured estate that surrounded the above ground facility, including the Tower. If there was one thing he hated, it was dealing with bean counters. The Triumvirate had been climbing in and out of the Centre ledger sheets for the last two months, pointing out every last discrepancy and possibility of fraud, and still the steady bleed of money had continued.

Although once with more than adequate slush funds to protect it against anything the winds of ill-fortune could have slung at it, the Centre had seen its supply of liquid capital had been steadily shrinking. Worse: the rate of decline had been increasing sharply over the past two years. Raines leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap as he let his eyes wander aimlessly across green grass to the shining band of blue that was the ocean beyond. He knew at least part of the reason for the decline, of course; but he wasn't ready to go public to the Triumvirate with the details of Project Duplicity quite yet, not until there had been measurable success demonstrated by at least one of the test subjects.

Duplicity – the ideal answer to the incredible success and then complete debaucle that had been the Pretender Project – was now nearly eighteen years old. Raines had to smile with satisfaction every time he considered the entire premise of the project. The Centre still was on the cutting edge of technology and building upon the successes it had achieved. Jarod was but one individual, raised in a far more lax environment by someone whose scruples had been taught to the genius as well as the more obvious subject material. Duplicity took care of that, both in number as well as environment.

Gemini, long ago 'rescued' by Jarod and his father, had been but a prototype – a very successful prototype – that had unfortunately slipped through the Centre's fingers. But he had by no means been intended or indeed remained the sole progeny of the process. Moving the young man to the Alaskan facility had been a huge mistake, one that had brought the escaped Pretender's attention and made liberating the nearly-grown Pretender embarrassingly easy. It was also a mistake that hadn't been repeated since.

Jarod had been held by the Centre long enough that there had been a more than adequate supply of his genetic material, and in the intervening years, the cloning process had been streamlined to eliminate many of the grotesque "errors" that had arisen during the initial tests. Duplicity had taken the highly successful process and put it to use creating copies of the original genius. Twelve of them in all had been successfully created, including Gemini, but Sudden Infant Death had claimed the life of one infant four years ago, and Jarod had run off with Gemini. This left ten Duplicates housed in a research facility located in the depths of federal wilderness lands in northern Montana where they would be housed and educated and work.

Building the facility on protected land had cost a modest fortune in bribes and contract kickbacks, but setting up ten Sim Labs and staffing those labs with properly trained and motivated personnel had been one of the most expensive parts of the entire effort. Neither expense appeared anywhere on the official Centre balance sheets, nor did any direct mention of Project Duplicity or its intent exist within the Centre mainframe, where Jarod and his infuriating habit of uncovering secrets could trip over it. Personal discretionary bank accounts from previous Chairmen – accounts that had once been fed regularly by skimming a small percent of the profit from simulations performed by Jarod – had been the first to be tapped, because they were the ones that the Centre didn't officially know about in the first place. But those accounts had run out about the time that Jarod had escaped nearly ten years before – and the collective expense had only grown higher the older each of the Duplicates had become.

All he had to do was hang on a little bit longer, Raines reassured himself. Cancer, the clone who was but eleven months younger than Gemini, was almost ready to begin running full-scale SIMs; and Leo, thirteen months younger Cancer, was poised at nearly the same stage of readiness. Once word started to leak out that the Centre was back in simulation business in a big way, Raines knew the profit would once more flood in – and those discretionary accounts that had been retired with but a few hundred dollars in them would soon fatten again.

Which was why the increase of discretionary expenditures over the last four months was so infuriating! The last thing he needed was to have the Accounting Department declare a fiscal emergency and notify the stockholders of looming insolvency; that could have a cascade effect that would result in bankruptcy on the very eve of those huge, long-term profits. All of the departments had been put under the watch of an auditor drawn from the accounting pool in an effort to stem just enough of the cost to see the Centre through to the solvency Cancer and Leo would bring.

All he had to do was hang on a little bit longer. It would be his mantra – his prayer – because in it was his legacy as Chairman.

oOoOo

Miss Parker shifted her gaze back and forth between the open spreadsheet on her computer screen and the hardcopy expense report that Mr. Raines had handed her. The two resembled each other only in terms of the ledger account number and the number of actual entries; but the amounts listed as having been submitted for each of those entries, however, was drastically inflated on the sheet Raines had handed her. What was more, some of the entries that she'd submitted claims for were outright missing, and some of items Raines claimed she'd requested reimbursement for were outlandish to the point of hilarity.

One item caught her eye: a claim regarding a dinner for six at the best steakhouse in all of Delaware, dated only a week ago. Frustrated and starting to boil, Miss Parker looked up at her sweeper, standing in deceptive nonchalance with his back against the wall between her desk and her office door. "Sam?"

Sam started, something she wasn't used to seeing often, and Miss Parker looked closer. Strange; it seemed her personal sweeper was tired. "Yes, ma'am?" he answered immediately, blinking, straightening to attention.

For the first time since she'd accepted the man as her bodyguard and human pitbull, she wondered whether she'd just caught the man almost dozing on the job. Still, she had more important things to think about. "What were we up to a week ago Wednesday night?" she asked him with a frown.

"Wednesday?" Sam frowned too. "Oh yes! Wasn't that the night…"

"Exactly." Miss Parker nodded in grim satisfaction and turned her monitor screen around and turned the papers in front of her around so they too could be legible from the other side of the desk. "Come here and look at this and tell me I'm dreaming."

Sam pushed away from the wall and walked over to lean over and look at the computer screen. His frown deepened as he looked back and forth. "But… That can't be right. I wasn't there…"

"I know," Miss Parker shook her head as she turned both the papers and the monitor back around where they belonged. "I was with Evan's foster parents watching him in a class play, and not in Dover living high on the hog. You had the night off, if memory serves…"

"I was in Richmond, helping my sister move," Sam remembered finally.

"So my question to you is: who went to Dover, and who signed my name – or yours – to the receipts?" Miss Parker flipped the page to expose a page with receipts attached and flipped through the receipts one by one.

Sam glanced at them, and Miss Parker could see immediately when he noted what was bothering _her _so much. "Wait a minute! That's not your signature!" he exclaimed. He flipped a receipt of his own and growled. "That's not mine either."

"No shit, Sherlock." Miss Parker pulled the papers in front of her again and flopped the folder closed with a slap of the hand on the desktop. "But this came out of the same computer…"

"Didn't Mr. Raines just tell you he wanted a complete overhaul of the Centre mainframe, with an eye to security?" Sam asked, leaning hard on the clear plexiglass desk and still flipping through the hardcopy material in the folder. "Can't you check this out then?"

Miss Parker rose from her chair and wandered over to her window, leaning and staring. "Finding this only confirms the need for more security, Sam. It won't necessarily get us out of hot water with…" Her jerk of the head toward the floors of the Tower over their heads was crystal clear as to whom she was referring.

"But it proves that WE aren't as big a hemorrhage as Mr. Raines considered," Sam suggested, his tone hopeful. "Whether the same shenanigans are being pulled on Mr. Lyle, however, is anybody's guess…"

"Yeah, it would at that…" Miss Parker ran her hands through her dark hair, pulling it back from her face in frustration and then toyed with the pendant at her neck. "But the bitch of it is that even finding out who made up this crap won't tell us _why_." She stalked back over to her desk and flounced herself into her chair again. "I'm not going to rest until I know exactly how such a stupid thing could happen – and until I know who is faking our expense reports…"

oOoOo

Sam's internal alarm suddenly went off. What was it that the nameless person had said all those nights ago, that Miss Parker's probing into areas she shouldn't would result in a possible "accident"?

"Uh… Miss Parker? Why don't you let me see what I can discover about this…"

Miss Parker looked up at her sweeper with surprise. "You? That's not your job, Sam…"

He forced himself to look directly into her storm-grey eyes without flinching. "You're going to have your hands full with this mainframe inspection and upgrade, and I could use something to occupy my time while you confer with the Centre geek-squad."

She cocked her head. "And just how do you think you'll go about this little hunt?" Her tone was sarcastic, but there was a hint of gratitude behind it. Sam knew an overhaul of the huge Centre mainframe – the repository for all the information gathered or created by the Centre – was a mammoth task in the best of times. A little help chasing down this latest case of gremlins and outright demons within the Centre walls would be quite welcome.

Sam let a smile of confidence light his face, a confidence he didn't entirely feel. "I have a few ideas I'd like to chase down, if you don't mind…" When Miss Parker continued to have a skeptical expression on her face, he added, "Look. It's my ass on the line too here. I didn't see Mr. Raines making any exceptions for sweepers in his plans to ship people to Africa."

"Are you sure?"

Sam almost smiled. She was ready to accept his help! Good! "Just let me handle this part of things, Miss Parker, and you take care of giving Mr. Raines that answer he wanted and doing the security overhaul. How much you want to bet that this ends up being a prank Jarod pulled on the computer a long time ago, and it's just taken this long for us to uncover it…"

Miss Parker nodded and settled back in her chair with a sigh. "I have to admit that I need this extra investigation like I need a hole in the head."

"I can do it, Miss Parker," he reassured her gently. He knew better than to outright demand the job; all too often, she responded to that kind of pressure by exploding in the opposite direction than the one desired. "Let me show you I'm more than just muscle…"

"You'll report directly to me…"

"Of course." He rose. "I think I'll head down to Mr. Broots' office and see if he can bring up any history of this report – or any sign of duplicate books."

"Don't forget," Miss Parker reminded him, "I start seeing clients at two this afternoon. I'm going to want you here…"

"I'll be there, Miss Parker," Sam reassured her firmly. "Don't worry about me." He held out his hand for the folder. "I'll get this stuff copied so that you can be working on that explanation Mr. Raines requested while I do a little digging."

After a long look, Miss Parker stretched out her hand and gave over the folder to Sam. "Don't be long with that thing," she told him. "I'm going to want to have it on hand in a bit."

"I won't. I'll be right back."

Sam waited until he'd managed to escape Miss Parker's office completely before sighing deeply in relief. That had been too close, he told himself as he hurried down the hallway to where Mr. Broots had his computer lab, where most of the office machinery for the Sim Lab and associated offices was kept. Hopefully, however, Miss Parker would find enough to keep her attention occupied on the mainframe overhaul and let him very quietly bury that report and any questions about it.

At least he'd bury that report and related questions until he knew more about who was threatening her, _and_ had formulated a plan for protecting her against herself.

oOoOo

Mr. Lyle's eyes were like those of a shark, O'Brien thought: cold and virtually empty of anything besides an unthinking hunger for… He blinked and shook the man's hand, deciding that maybe it was best for him NOT to think about what Mr. Lyle was hungry for. The stories in the Centre grapevine were lurid enough. "Mr… O'Brien, is it?" His name on Mr. Lyle's lips sounded oily, made him feel unclean.

"Yes, sir," O'Brien turned and found the client chair in front of the dark-haired man's desk. "I'm the auditor Mr. Raines has appointed to oversee your expense account in regards to the Pretender Project…"

Something even more inhuman flickered briefly behind that cold gaze, and O'Brien felt the hackles on the back of his neck rise. "Are you familiar with this information then?" Lyle tapped the open folder on his desk and then handed it over to the outstretched hand.

"No, sir." Slowly O'Brien shook his head. "This is the first time I've seen your records, Mr. Lyle," he said, handing the folder back.

"You didn't put this bullshit together?"

"No, sir!" The accountant shook his head vehemently this time. "I only received my re-assignment early this morning. Mr. Raines suggested that I take the time to introduce myself to you and your sister before…"

"Then you aren't aware that most of the reason you're here is utter and complete nonsense?" Mr. Lyle rose and began to pace behind his desk. "I didn't submit claims for three nights in the Ritz in Baltimore for last month. Hell, I didn't even leave Delaware…"

"Mr. Lyle, I don't know much about what has gone on before. My job is to make sure what happens from now on is appropriate and reasonable…"

"Just get out." Lyle sat back down behind his desk and pointed. "I don't need any damned babysitter to tell me how or where I should spend the Centre's money in the effort to bring…" Those dead eyes looked decidedly dangerous, and the hairs rose on the back of O'Brien's neck. "You'll find all my receipts in order from here on out – trust me. You can go."

O'Brien was glad to get away from the eyes of the hungry shark. He would be talking to _that_ Parker sibling as seldom as possible from now on, _that_ was for sure!

oOoOo

"There's been a slight wrinkle in the plans."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Define "small wrinkle," please…"

"The over-charging of the Pretender Project teams has been uncovered – and Raines has assigned an auditor to do nothing but oversee their books from now on."

"Someone we can control?"

"Probably not. He's one of the top auditors they have on staff, and Raines has removed him from the accounting department entirely and made him accountable directly to the Tower. More than likely, I'll not see him in this part of the Centre again for a while."

"That's unfortunate," the voice agreed with a small sigh, "but the Pretender Project isn't the only high-security secret project the Centre has going. We'll be fine, just turning our attention to some of the other…"

"You don't understand! Miss Parker herself was part of the group placed under audit and told that the cost-overruns for her team were becoming a problem. She's not an idiot; she'll see some of the discrepancies between her personal record and the one Raines has been given. Face it: she's just been given that first nudge toward starting an investigation before we're ready to deal with her."

Again, there was a pause on the other end of the line. "We can't afford to take her out of the game just yet, though. So much of the success of this depends on keeping her in place and in the dark until it's too late for her to do anything. How torqued is she?"

"I don't know. I haven't spoken to her at all since long before the meeting in Raines' office this morning. I _do _know, however, that both she and Lyle were given documentation of the extraordinary reimbursement claims we've managed to slip through of late. I had to order the printing job myself."

"Perhaps someone in the Centre's accounting department has sharper eyes than we'd estimated."

"The Centre employs some of the brightest CPAs to graduate from university, just like we do."

"Well, don't worry about it," the voice responded calmly. "Like I say, we have ample directions of action to explore that losing that one way to bleed the Centre financially won't matter much. How goes the investigation into Lyle's somewhat…" the voice coughed, "…"odd" taste in cuisine?"

"Oh, the evidence is mounting nicely. There's not quite enough to take to an Attorney General or to the FBI, but if he continues his activities at a regular pace, we should have more than enough to make him a liability for the Centre."

"Good. Having their Legal Department up to their chins in murder indictments rather than overseeing contract provisions will make a good diversion as things proceed. See what you can do to speed up that end of things."

"I'm taking care of it."

"Now, to the meat of the matter. Have you made contact and gotten things moving in regards to Duplicity?"

"I found the man we need, and I've given him detailed instructions so that he knows exactly what kind of team to put together."

"Any time-frame of action yet?"

"Not until he tells me he has all the resources on hand."

"We have the Centre off-balance, although they may not know how much yet. We don't want to lose that advantage…"

"I know that! But moving on Duplicity isn't going to be a cake-walk, you know. That's one of the most secure facilities they operate in the Western Hemisphere."

"We _need _Duplicity if this is going to work, not only to give us a head-start after we bring the Centre down, but to help with tipping over their house of cards."

"I know that too. But like I said, things are starting to come together. We need to be patient and let those who know their business do their business. If we start trying to push things to go faster, we could ruin our chances at winning."

This time, the pause on the other end of the line was a substantial one. "Dammit, I'll be glad when you can be working for us directly again, rather than just hearing from you once a week by voice…"

"It's coming, Jim, it's coming. And let me tell you: I'll be glad to be back working in the family firm myself. Fifteen years undercover has been more than enough for me. I'm gonna want my own corner office…"

"I got one waiting for you, complete with a view of the bay."

"Well, then, let me get back to work so that I can move into that office sooner rather than later."

"You'll call again?"

"Don't I always?"

"Be careful, and watch out for that Parker bitch. I don't put anything past her."

"Don't worry. I have a couple of diversions up my sleeve if I start to see her poking around where we don't want her looking."

"Nothing that takes her out yet!" The voice was emphatic. "Not yet!

"No… But it will be enough to maybe give her a decent set of ulcers and knock her out of the arena without removing her from the game per se. Trust me."

"You're my brother. Of course I trust you."

"I'll talk to you later."

"Good luck."

oOoOo

Jim McKenna used the forefinger of the hand holding the telephone handset to rub below his nose thoughtfully for a moment before finally replacing the device in the cradle on his desk. It hardly seemed possible that Jake, his twin brother, had been stuck in the Centre for fifteen years now, planted there by their father in anticipation of the day the Eire Foundation could mount an attack on the firm that had been their idea from the very start.

Almost a hundred years ago, two men had met aboard a ship carrying them from Southampton to New York and together come up with an innovative idea: to build a firm dedicated to sitting at the cutting edge of scientific technology and to make such discoveries as might come from within a practical product to be marketed globally. Charles Parker and Eugene McKenna had reached New York, pooled their limited resources to find a roof over their heads, and gone to work. Both were ambitious, both were adroit at finding ways to profit from their work at a higher rate than the regular worker. Between them, it had taken but five years to buy out a small pharmacy in the center of Manhattan and hire a chemist. Eugene had an idea on how to build the kind of organization that had really been HIS brainchild, but it was Charles who truly had the knack to make money.

At the time, it had been more than mere convenience to have Parker's name on all of the official documents. After all, Eugene McKenna was a wanted man back in Scotland. And it had been that little fact which had made it possible, as The Centre Pharmaceuticals began to grow into a bigger and bigger enterprise that eventually relocated to a facility located in Delaware, for Parker to slowly and surely push McKenna out of any position of authority within the organization. In fact, the bulk of the funds used to build The Centre had been Parker's, and it didn't take that long before Parker began to deny that McKenna had been the creative genius with the spark of the idea. McKenna was treated – and was informed in no uncertain terms – that he always had been and always would be only a paid associate.

A mere employee. A nobody.

McKenna had left the Centre an aging and embittered man, his idea for success in the New World had been stolen and turned into something quite different from what he'd intended by a man he'd trusted. McKenna had been smart enough, however, to have been stockpiling his meager profits over the years; and so he had a tidy sum to use to relocate himself and his family to Philadelphia and begin again, using much the same tactics as he and Parker had used – only this time, starting with a machine shop. The Eire Foundation had been the result of that.

Vincent McKenna had kept his father's spirit alive and, over the fifty years of his tenure as Chairman, seen the Foundation move into research fields that the Centre had largely ignored: electronics and weapons development. The U.S. Government had found the Foundation's services and products very useful, and _that _had made it possible for McKenna to build his family's Foundation into an organization easily the equal of the Centre in many ways. Then, ten years ago, Vincent had died of a heart attack in the middle of a board meeting, leaving the Foundation in the hands of his twin sons.

The Electronics Technologies Department had transformed itself into a Micro-electronics Technologies Department that was now a leader in the newly opened field of nano-technology. Foundation weapons components were now basic parts of a goodly portion of the US arsenal. And finally the Foundation had started dabbling in some of the fields the Centre had dominated: pharmaceuticals and psychological studies.

Jake had stayed behind in Philadelphia to run things, building on the behemoth left by his father until the Foundation was in a position to compete, sometimes successfully, against the Centre. Jim, with his genius for high finances and affinity for numbers in general, had already been convinced to go undercover in the Centre by his father, and Jake began to take advantage of having that inside information. The McKenna family knew the value and the process of the blood feud, and Jim was more than willing to go and spy on their immediate enemy. His position made it possible to counter-bid on contracts, and thus elbow the Centre out of deals on a regular basis now.

The Foundation found that taking a page from the Centre's rulebook had been a very effective tool in maintaining their own internal security. Both twins had been taught the benefits of ruthlessness at their father's knee, always with the idea that, someday, the McKennas would win back from the Parkers what was theirs by right. And so, when expedient, Jake had used intimidation, bribery, fraud and blackmail to force people to do as he wished them to. His employees were paid well for their services and treated with both respect and consideration. But there was little attempt at double-talk or subtlety: the internal security force was known as "guards", "assassins" or "arsonists"; and cameras were everywhere in the research facility.

And now, it seemed, seventy years' worth of revenge-plotting was about to pay off.

Jake's eyes glittered. With the Centre gone, the Foundation would be playing to an immense field with very few other competitors capable of mounting much of a game.

But first things first…

He pushed the intercom button. "Is Mr. Simmons here yet?" he asked impatiently.

"Yes, sir," Angie, his secretary, responded immediately. "He's been waiting for you to finish your call for about five minutes now."

"Send him on in, then." Jake smiled to himself and folded his hands on his desk. This Simmons fellow had come with the kind of impeccable record that any large corporation or foundation's financial department would drool over. Getting him hired and busy at work securing and bolstering the Foundation's fiscal stability in preparation for new and expanded business had been a priority item for him ever since the employment application had been brought to his attention. After all, the _last_ thing the Foundation needed was to walk down the same path as its nemesis, the Centre, had been walking for the last five years under William Raines.

The door at the far end of the huge office swung open on silent hinges, letting the tall, dark-haired man past the muscular guard. Jake took in the man's demeanor and bearing and immediately knew that this was the kind of man he wanted working for the Foundation – Simmons was apparently sure of himself and exuded talent. The perfectly trimmed moustache and goatee spoke of attention to detail – ideal traits for one in the position to which the candidate was aspiring. Dark eyes glittered with almost alarming intelligence behind a simple pair of wire-rimmed glasses.

Pleased that the man had matched the resume, McKenna rose and extended his hand across the desk. "I'm Jake McKenna, Chairman of the Eire Foundation."

"Jarod Simmons," Jarod smiled and shook the red-headed man's hand firmly, "and I'm very honored to meet you, sir."


	3. Chapter 3 - Mixed Signals

Chapter 3 – Mixed Signals

Jarod climbed into the small economy sedan that he'd decided would best fit the character he would be in this Pretend and then threw his head back against the headrest once the door was closed. This Pretend was going to take more concentration – and potentially take more out of him – than he'd even considered. For the first time in all the Pretends he'd undertaken, he'd finally tripped over an organization that reminded him far too vividly of the Centre. The all-present sweepers at nearly every juncture and doorway demonstrated an even higher sense of paranoia than even the Parkers had managed to instill, and there were even more surveillance cameras in plain sight than most of the high-security Centre labs had contained. He would really have to watch his step, and his knee-jerk responses to the environmental stimuli. His best bet, if he knew what was good for him, would be to spend the rest of the day and most of the next two days re-SIMming the plan in light of the new information.

Tiredly he reached into the breast pocket of his sports jacket and brought out the red notebook in which he'd stored the clipped newspaper story that had caught his attention, as well as his notes. The initial newspaper story hadn't been a very long one: a man had been found murdered in what looked like a simple gangland execution, leaving behind a widow and an infant son; but subsequent inquiry into both the murder victim and the circumstances had yielded a troubling conclusion: Bob Rogers had been a research engineer with an organization known as the Eire Foundation involved in weapons research and development who had recently separated from his wife of thirteen years due to what she'd alleged as a sudden personality change and an affair. According to the wife, outgoing and philanthropic Rogers had become withdrawn and sullen over the past eight months or so; and according to Arlene, Rogers' estranged wife, had spent endless hours on the telephone with someone named Nicky.

It had taken Jarod three days to trace the calls made on Rogers' home phone to "Nicky" to an exchange of the Philadelphia office of the FBI. "Nicky" turned out to be Nicky Van Derling – Special Agent Nicholas Van Derling. Suddenly it had become apparent that Rogers had uncovered something he felt important enough to bring in law enforcement, probably related to his job, and that something was considered important enough to the Foundation that he'd been eliminated rather than have that information exposed or acted upon.

Jarod had then done his homework on the Eire Foundation itself, delving into the company history, and had come away feeling like he needed to take a shower. Except for the name and the names of the major players, the Foundation was in many ways very much like the Centre, only the Centre had been around as a legal entity for nearly a decade longer. Originally a research and development firm with a couple of solid lines of investigation, the Foundation had blossomed into a global enterprise commanding a clientele that included governments and corporations alike. He had been surprised, however, when it hadn't occurred to him that the similarities between the Centre and the Foundation were more than just skin-deep. Walking into the place today had required real discipline; there was something about the headquarters of the Foundation that had triggered a horrifying case of déjà vu.

Fully half of that impression had come as a result of his final job interview with the Chairman of the Foundation himself. Jake McKenna was obviously a man who was more than capable of seeing through a flimsy story, and Jarod knew he'd have to remember to not fudge an iota on his cover story. McKenna had a reputation among his peers for being extraordinarily ruthless in pursuit of a desired goal, and there were many rumors of politicians, legislators and law enforcement officials bought and paid for or even removed from office with Foundation funding. Now that he'd been in the place, Jarod had a hunch that the order to remove Rogers as a problem had most likely come from that well-appointed office he'd just been in. He also knew, however, he was up against a worthy opponent in proving his suspicion to a degree that would at least lend credence to any confession that might be wrung from the man eventually, and to do so in such a manner that he'd be able to disengage from his Pretend with his freedom and anonymity intact.

Jarod sighed, sat up straighter and put the key in the ignition of the vehicle. His sister, Emily, would probably be home from work already and wondering where he was. She had agreed to put him up in her apartment while he ran his Pretend; actually, she'd insisted upon it. She, like her parents and his other brothers – Ethan and JD – were never pleased when Jarod would decide to put his unique talents for uncovering inconvenient truths to practice in order to get justice for another underdog. Margaret and Charles had learned that too much complaining could lead to a several months-long estrangement between themselves and their Pretender son, but Emily had yet to develop tact. Still, he had needed a place to stay in Philadelphia, and Emily's placement in the editorial staff of the largest newspaper in the city would give him access to information he could find exceedingly handy as time when on.

He looked down at his watch. It was late, four-thirty in the afternoon already. Emily would be home soon and busy in the kitchen preparing a meal for the two of them, and it was time to retire to a place where he could re-evaluate his Pretend in relative peace. He'd have to remember to say very little about the similarities that he'd discovered between the Foundation and the Centre to her during this Pretend. Emily was one of the most vocal advocates of his having cut off all communication with the Centre when their family had finally reunited, and she'd no doubt be worried that Jarod would be getting himself in over his head with another place equally evil.

She had little to worry about, however.

Jarod had had no reason to stay in touch with either of them. Miss Parker finally was as fully informed about the truth of her family as she could be and still she was unwilling to leave, and most of Sydney's secret wounds had been uncovered and were finally healing a little with his mentor no more willing to leave the Centre than Miss Parker. Dropping away from the Centre radar, then, had been hilariously simple. After all, the only reason he'd stayed _on_ their radar was because of the little clues he'd left behind to be discovered by the team following on his trail.

The Pretend he'd done in Miami immediately after the incident on the Isle of Carthis had been the cut-off point. At the time, it had been weeks since last he'd called either Miss Parker or Sydney, and he simply had pulled up stakes from that Pretend and left Florida without giving any indication of where he was headed or what he intended. He hadn't even left behind the red notebook to give evidence that the man they were looking for was he, nor had he spoken to any of the Cuban family he'd stayed with about what his next plans were. For all intents and purposes, the trail of the Centre's escaped Pretender had evaporated into thin air in a barrio street that would be difficult to discover at best.

He'd then spent six months on his parents' new sprawling farm in upstate Pennsylvania, six months that had seen him finally learn all about the dynamics of living in a real family. Ethan and JD – as Gemini had perversely chosen to be called, short for 'Jarod Dupicate' – each were still living on the farm, giving Jarod siblings as well as parents to grow close to. For a while, just knowing that he was finally in a place where he _belonged_, not as a piece of property, but as a loved family member, had been enough.

That feeling of sufficiency had lasted exactly six months.

Those six months, while in so many ways exactly what he'd wanted for so long, had finally worn on him in ways he could have never expected. However wonderful he'd dreamed having a mother could be, he'd eventually come to resent his mother's insistence on trying to direct his life and his choices. In the end, he began to miss the relative freedom of moving from place to place without anyone else to gainsay him or attempt to dissuade him from helping those who couldn't help themselves achieve a bit of justice.

His first Pretend in over half a year had taken place in New York City, and the distance away from the family and the slipping into old habits and practices became more an expression of rebellion and disillusionment than anything else. When he'd returned to the farm, things had eased somewhat with Ethan and JD teasing him mercilessly about his "Superman Complex," only to have the same feeling of constriction and disillusion develop over time once more.

Since then, he'd managed to find an excuse to practice what he was coming to consider his unique art form every eight to ten weeks, with a couple of weeks of relaxation and simple farm labor on what he considered the family estate to clear his mind in between times. Margaret and Charles had eventually resigned themselves to the fact that their oldest child was too wild to be held down too long in one place, and accept that his returning to the fold when the Pretend was through was as much of a family tie as Jarod would ever give them.

His cell phone chirped at him, and he smiled as he checked the caller ID. "Hi Em," he greeted his caller lightly.

"Jar! Are you on your way home yet?"

"Yup. Need something?"

"Can you stop at the grocers and pick up a head of lettuce? I forgot it when I went shopping the other day…"

"One head of lettuce," he nodded as he put the car in reverse and carefully backed out of the visitor's parking place near the main entrance of the Foundation. "Anything else?"

"Well? Did you get the job?"

He smiled. She knew the basics of what he was up to; it had been a case of being honest with her as he'd accepted her invitation to take up residence in her guest bedroom. "I start on Monday," he told her with just the right note of enthusiasm. "_and_ I got into the department I wanted to."

"Congratulations, big brother!"

"Yeah…" Jarod grimaced at the steering wheel, unwilling to consider whether that was an accomplishment worthy of congratulations or not. "I'll see you in a few minutes then, as soon as I pick up the lettuce." He eased the sedan to a halt and watched the traffic on the main road for a comfortable space into which he could slip.

He put the cell phone on the dashboard in the little pocket he'd designed for it that included a plug for a hands-free headset and took note of where he was. There was a supermarket on the main street that he'd travel on his way to Emily's home, so picking up her lettuce wouldn't take much more time at all. He could enjoy her home-cooked meal, fend off her questions as best he could and basically relax the way any working man would after a long day. And then, when Emily headed off to bed, he could begin the mental relaxation exercises that would lead him into a state where he could review the plan as he'd SIMmed it and incorporate the security information about the physical site he'd learned about.

Then he would try not to have a nightmare, and something told him _that_ might be the hardest part of all.

oOoOo

Jerry O'Brien sighed and stuck his framed diploma into the small cardboard box that the sweeper had brought him earlier. In a way, he was excited to be obviously moving up in the world, out from under the thumb of the exacting Les Vickering into a situation where he worked directly for the Chairman himself. But the interview he'd finally managed with the other team leader of the Pretender Project had been no less stressful than the first, making him wonder if he'd jumped from a frying pan and into a fire. Miss Parker had been no friendlier than had Mr. Lyle, although she had been much less threatening. She too had asked him about his familiarity with the documentation of what she termed "the alleged over-runs," and O'Brien knew then that he'd best familiarize himself very completely with whatever information Mr. Raines was basing his actions.

"So you're leaving us?" asked a deep voice from behind him.

"That's what they tell me," O'Brien answered without turning. The voice of the head of the accounting office was unmistakable. "I'm supposed to move to SL-17…"

"That's what Mr. Raines told me when he called me about an hour ago," Les Vickering nodded his freckled face soberly. "I tried to hang onto you, but Mr. Raines was determined…"

"You know…" O'Brien turned with a hand on his hip, "I have a feeling something's not exactly right. Mr. Raines was so certain that these people were stealing him blind, that they were using Centre funds to maintain themselves in a lavish lifestyle. And yet I got told very clearly by both of them that fully half of what they'd been accused of doing was falsified."

"Really?" Vickering's brows rose toward his hairline. "Do you really expect the accused to ever do anything but protest their innocence?"

O'Brien's face fell. "No," he admitted, "but I just have a gut feeling about this. These folks weren't just putting on an act, they were MAD about something"

"About getting caught…"

"Nope. About being set up." The younger man shrugged and turned.

"Well, you just do your job, and Mr. Raines will be pleased," Vickering told him in a firm tone. "And with any luck, when you've taken care of whatever you need to, you'll end up back up here, in the sun…" The red-haired man glanced in the direction of the windows situated high on the wall that let in the light from the late afternoon sun.

O'Brien shivered. The very idea of spending his entire workday seventeen floors UNDER ground was rattling, and he couldn't imagine Miss Parker or any of the rest of her team having been down there and working like that for years on end. "I'll be glad," he commented thinly. He reached down and picked up his little box. "I guess this is all of it, then."

Vickering stuck his hand out. "Good luck on your new assignment, O'Brien. Make us all proud."

The younger man nodded bleakly and moved past his former superior on the way out of the mass of cubicles that was the home of most of the Centre's accounting staff.

oOoOo

Jake McKenna's brows furled as he watched the auditor leave the protective shelter of the accounting department. Already those two had found some of the creative claims, had they? That didn't necessarily bode all that badly; after all, Jim had reminded him that the creative financial tinkering had been going on in a number of different directions for quite a while now. This one had probably surfaced first because of Mr. Raines' near-obsession with reacquiring the escaped Pretender.

The Centre grapevine was full of the news of the Parker twins' time on the carpet in the Tower, _and_ of the auditor forcing them to stop living so high on the hog. There was a sense of glee at news of the humiliation of the people most capable of intimidation, people whom other people moved away from as they walked down the corridors of the Centre.

McKenna picked a circuitous route through the cubbies on his way back to his office at the very rear of the room, taking the time to look over the shoulders of the workers who were his responsibility. He kicked at the chair of one dozing accountant, bringing him upright and alert and nearly bumping his nose on his monitor screen, and hit the close program keys on a popular solitaire game for another clerk. It made him feel a little better to keep his people in line, although he was beginning to feel the chafe of being stuck in a firm he so detested.

Fifteen years was a long time, a long time to wear a name that wasn't really his own, to have friends who didn't know the man behind the mask, to never socialize with family members. He'd given up a lot to play this role: a co-Chairmanship with Jim, a fiancé who would have never understood the need to adopt a completely new name and identity. His father had asked, and like the good son he was, he'd not thought twice.

Until now.

He wanted out. God how he wanted out!

The moment he was in his office, he carefully shut the door and sat down at his desk already rifling through his full Rolodex file for the proper card. Then he placed the call.

"Well?" he demanded harshly the moment the line was picked up. Charles Delgado was supposed to be one of the top wet-work experts to have ever been honorably discharged from Special Ops, and Delgado knew they were working under a time restraint.

"I have my team," the voice on the other end of the line announced with a touch of triumph. "Good men, experts in their fields. I served with a couple of them…"

"About time," McKenna mumbled to himself and then cleared his throat. "Call them and tell them to be at the corner of 8th and Pine in Dover at eight o'clock tomorrow night. It's time they learned the details of the job I need done, and time to get a schedule of action in place."

"Sure thing, boss," the voice drawled. "Eight PM at 8th and Pine – you got it."

"Don't be late," McKenna warned and then hung up.

He'd have to be careful, he thought and then sighed. His time in this hellhole was coming to an end; the last thing he needed to do was to ruin everything.

oOoOo

"You came!" Evan beamed and dashed across the living room and into his big sister's arms.

"I wouldn't forget that this was the weekend you're supposed to be with me, Little Man," Miss Parker hugged her little brother tightly and then looked up into Margot Laughton's round face and smiled. "I take it he's all packed?"

"Oh, you know how he is about these visits, Miss Parker," was the response. "He came home from school hardly able to concentrate on anything but getting all of his stuff packed, and then has been back and forth to the window looking for you for the last hour. He was starting to make me dizzy!"

"Margot!" Evan complained and then turned excited blue-grey eyes on his sister again. "What are we going to do this weekend, Sissy?"

"Well," Miss Parker rose to her full height, "Grandpa Bill wants us to go to dinner tomorrow…"

"Aw…" Evan's dislike for his grandfather had never been a secret, and his grandfather's insistence that a condition of his weekends with his big sister was a certain number of hours with his grandfather too had been an irritant to them both. "Can't we, just once…"

Miss Parker shook her head sadly, and Margot put her hand on her foster-son's shoulder. "Now Evan, he _is _your grandfather…"

"He smells funny, and he always asks me all kinds of funny questions…"

"We'll just make sure we do all sorts of fun stuff otherwise, to make up for it," Miss Parker promised and reached for a backpack that looked positively overstuffed. "Get your suitcase…" She exchanged an understanding glance with his foster mother. No doubt Evan had packed nearly everything of any value to him again, as he did so often.

"Sunday night?" Margot asked quietly.

"Probably late Sunday night," Miss Parker agreed in an equally quiet voice. "I'll get him back in time for a good night's sleep before school, but not a whole lot sooner than that."

Margot bent and kissed the boy on the cheek. "You be good for your sister now…"

"He will," Miss Parker assured the woman before Evan could speak for himself. "You ready?"

"Yeah!" Evan put his free hand into his sister's. "Will we see Sydney this time?"

Miss Parker managed to disguise a sigh. "I don't know. I'm not sure what he was going to be doing this weekend. We can always call him up tomorrow morning after breakfast and find out…"

"I hope so," the little boy chattered contentedly. "He tells some of the best stories…"

_What __**is**__ it about the connection Sydney had with children?_ Miss Parker wondered as she opened the trunk of her car for Evan's luggage. As much as her little brother disdained visiting his grandfather, he loved to be around the old psychiatrist. And Sydney showered the boy with attention and what she could only hope was genuine concern. Evan would be crushed if he ever found out the old man was faking it.

No, she corrected herself, Sydney's attitude around Evan had always been one of concern and affection of a grandfatherly sort. He'd even made efforts to attend some of the school events that were the purview of parents and grandparents when Evan would bubble about it during a visit beforehand. What was more, he never failed to regale the boy with praise afterwards. More than once Miss Parker had caught herself wishing that Sydney had been even half as demonstrative with _her_ when she was that age, or especially in those painful and lonely months between when her mother had left her and when her father had shipped her off to boarding school.

"Sissy?"

"Hmmm?" Miss Parker answered, shaking off her reverie and closing the trunk so that she could unlock the passenger door for the boy.

"You OK?"

"I'm fine, Little Man," she replied, finding it not all that hard to replace her thoughtful expression with a smile of affection. "What do you say about finding a place that makes a pepperoni pizza for supper?"

"_YEAH!_"

oOoOo

Lyle slid into one of the booths at the very back of the restaurant and barely glanced up as the waiter gave him the scripted greeting and slid a menu in front of him. All of Lyle's attention was on the woman who was dining alone two tables away, just as she did every Friday evening at this time. Her blue-black hair hung long and was gathered into a simple band at the base of her neck, and her olive-colored skin was perfect. Her face was one of classic Chinese beauty, of the sort one would find memorialized on porcelain or in a careful brush painting.

"Scotch on the rocks, and I'll have the grilled salmon tonight," Lyle ordered absently, his glittering grey-blue eyes never leaving his prey. He'd been stalking Roselyn Chu for five weeks now, spending every weekend moment graphing her habits and established routes and routines. Friday nights were spent here, in this bayside seafood restaurant, Saturday mornings had her rising early to jog along the beach for an hour before heading north to Baltimore. Evidently she had a sister she visited regularly there. Sunday afternoon she would return to Dover, usually taking in a movie at the local multiplex before dining in an Italian deli on the west side.

Lyle nodded mutely as the waiter deposited his drink in front of him on a napkin along with his dinner salad. Rosalyn was having the grilled salmon too; it was what she always ordered on Friday night. Lyle had gotten into the habit of ordering the same thing as his prey, with only the stiff scotch as deviation. He lifted the glass to his lips and sipped at the sharp amber liquor after very subtly raising his glass.

Tonight would be the night: Fridays were the best times to interfere with her schedule with enough time between then and when she'd be missed to accomplish everything he intended. Weekdays she was a hard worker, often spending ten to twelve hour workdays and carpooling with other colleagues at the office. She had no love interests to speak of; only once had Lyle seen her out with a man. Rosalyn Chu was an intensely private individual, exactly the kind of person that it was a pleasure to hunt.

His prey smiled up at the waiter, making small talk, and Lyle picked up his fork and stabbed at the salad with a perverse sense of jealousy. He'd have to hide his feelings for the time being, however; she wasn't his quite yet. No, that would happen in the parking lot of the restaurant in about an hour. Then she'd be his, and never anybody else's ever again.

He had his nest all prepared: a motel room a few miles northeast, towards the Delaware-Maryland border, where he could spend his time with her without interruption. The individual cabins that comprised the old fashioned motor inn fit into his plans beautifully. It was almost a shame that he'd only be able to visit the place once. There was adequate privacy to allow for making sure disposal of the body afterwards wouldn't be an issue either.

Lyle made another stab at the hapless lettuce of his salad. This evening's and the night's pending entertainment were as much a commentary on the warning he'd received from Raines by telephone only an hour or so before the day had ended, a warning that the legal department would no longer be at his disposal if any of his extra-curricular activities caught the attention of the local constabulary. _How dare he!_ Lyle fumed and munched his greens without moving his eyes from his prey. He'd been doing his hunting for years and only rarely caused a legal ripple. He had his process down to a fine science, up to and including the meal that would take place precisely twenty-four hours later.

Then, suddenly, his prey wasn't alone. The smile Lyle had considered his alone was now being bestowed on another: a tall Oriental man who bent and deposited a sweet and probably proprietary kiss on Rosalyn's cheek before sitting down across the table from her with her hand still held within his. From the looks of it after the waiter arrived, the man was joining Rosalyn for dinner. Evidently his prey had a social life – perhaps even a love life – after all. This wasn't the same man he'd seen her with before, and _this _man acted as if the two of them shared a much more intimate relationship.

Lyle swore softly and then pushed his salad away in disgust. His stomach roiled in frustration and disappointment, and he rose quickly. With a snarl, he pulled out his wallet and left enough on the table to cover his tab for the evening – along with enough of a tip to make the waiter happy – and strode angrily from the restaurant. His mood for the weekend was totally ruined, and he was still hungry.

She will be mine, Lyle promised himself. Maybe not this weekend, but by God, Rosalyn Chu would be his exclusively soon enough!

oOoOo

Sam knocked on the door of Miss Parker's office and then tried the doorknob, only to find it locked. _Good_, he thought in satisfaction; _with any luck, she's already gone for the weekend_. He glanced down at his wristwatch and nodded to himself. Yup, already gone, and more than likely, she'd left early to pick up her little brother Evan from his foster mother and taken him with her again. That was something that had been happening more and more often lately. Not that he didn't approve; having Evan in her life had given her eyes the kind of life that had been missing for far too long. Perhaps _her_ being involved in Evan's life would give _him_ the opportunity to keep her distracted from doing too much investigation in the wrong corners.

She actually had taken little notice of the tyke until almost a year after her father's – old Mr. Parker's – disappearance, but the fact of the child's existence was brought home to her on the day that Lyle had paraded the tyke past her in the drab uniform of Centre inmates. The memory of her explosion in Mr. Raines' office less than an hour later was still capable of bringing a twinkle to his eye. It wasn't often that someone was able to win such a clear victory over Mr. Lyle. Even Mr. Raines had pretended to be shocked and appalled at the idea of a Parker being confined in such circumstances.

The incorporation of a child into Miss Parker's previously childless existence had been a gradual one. At first it had been limited to the occasional visit in the underground nursery, a situation that had lasted only long enough for the child to suddenly understand what it meant to have a big sister. Once Miss Parker began to be the apple of little Evan's eye and make a big thing of seeing her coming through the nursery door, the Ice Queen of the Centre had started to melt. Sam suspected that he had been the sole witness to the moment his prickly boss had realized that she had someone to love and care for once more. The emotions had flown across her face with the speed of light and vanished equally quickly, but the moment had changed her forever.

Another meeting with Mr. Raines had been hastily arranged, and suddenly Evan was no longer living in the underground world of the Centre. A set of foster parents had been found, a childless couple who both worked in support capacities for the Centre; and weekend-long visits with Miss Parker in her home began to happen more and more often. The boy, once isolated and virtually unsocialized, was home-schooled for a year by a tutor hired by Miss Parker and then enrolled in public school the very next fall. Evan was a startlingly smart kid; already Miss Parker had had to re-hire the tutor to supplement the learning process from school in order to keep the boy's mind challenged and his temperament controlled.

Sam sighed and patted his inside jacket pocket. Yes, he still had that copy of the document Raines had given Miss Parker, as well as an idea of how to begin to track down the glaring disparity between the "official" financial record and that which Miss Parker had long since kept privately in her own spreadsheet program.

It had taken pulling in a favor from another of his sweeper buddies, but he'd spent his free time after the meeting that afternoon in the company of an accounting associate down on SL-2. By the time he'd walked toward the elevator, he'd learned more than he'd ever wanted to know about the ways in which the Centre handled receipts, claims and reimbursements. What he'd discovered was unsettling: there were enough holes in the accounting software to drive a security-breaching Greyhound bus through. He'd have to put that fact in front of Miss Parker too, as well as Broots. As part of the re-assessment of Centre security matters in the mainframe, it wouldn't do to have those very-sensitive files made prey to internal hackers and vandals.

Speaking of Mr. Broots…

He turned on his heel and walked down the hallway to test the door of the computer lab that was Broots' lair, finding that one closed and locked as well. It would take the genius of the nerdy little geek to poke through the mainframe from a protected position to try to discover the terminal stamp of the last person to modify the "official" financial records that had Miss Parker's tail feathers in a knot.

Hell! When Sydney and Broots found out exactly what was on that document, it wouldn't be just Miss Parker's tail feathers in a knot. Sam could still feel the hackles rise on his neck at the idea that someone would accuse him of wanting Centre reimbursement for four tickets to the latest heavyweight boxing championship bout in Atlantic City. He was especially pissed about that one, considering the fact he'd been at his sister's house in Jersey that weekend, helping her redecorate the second guest bedroom of her house into a nursery for his first nephew or niece.

How dare they try to foist some of this off on _him_! He didn't even _like_ professional boxing! Hockey maybe, but boxing…

Convinced that there was nothing that could be done until Monday morning, he shoved his hands into his jacket pocket and headed toward the elevator.

"You're still here?"

Sam turned his head slowly. "Just getting ready to take off," he answered Willy slowly, unable to put his response into a monosyllabic grunt with any grace.

"Quitting time was an hour ago…"

"I was looking things up for Miss Parker and lost track of time," he stated clearly and in a carefully-schooled tone of neutrality that belied the twisting in his stomach. "I'll clock out and mark on the card to deduct an hour from the day's shift."

Willy raised his head so that he could look down his wide nose at Sam. "I should hope so! The last thing your boss needs is to find out her personal sweeper is attempting to pad his paycheck by working overtime without permission."

"I said I'll take care of it," Sam repeated with only the slightest trace of increased heat. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"No…" Willy moved just enough as to appear to remove himself as an obstacle just as the silver door of the elevator slid to the left to open. "See you on Monday."

Sam didn't dare trust himself to bite back an insult or smartass quip, so he merely nodded and moved into the elevator, turning to punch at the button for the ground floor lobby and then fold his arms across his wide chest. Willy saw the subtle message not to intrude but to wait for the next elevator, and he smirked slightly and simply watched the elevator door slide shut again.

Sam sighed and let himself slump back against the faux wood interior of the elevator car. One of these days, he wasn't going to be able to hold himself back, and he and Willy would face off and resolve the long-standing question of just who was the strongest and most lethal sweeper.

But that was for one of these days. Right now he had other things to worry about, such as whether or not he'd be able to get a decent amount of sleep. Maybe he should think of investing in a bottle of Sominex (tm), just in case.

oOoOo

Charles Delgado had not lived to the ripe old age of forty by being careless.

The corner of Pine and 8th was a Centre warehouse, well maintained and with a heavy lock on the front door. He'd observed it for the better part of the later afternoon. It was an active warehouse filled with crates and cartons and boxes either bound for or en route from the Centre proper. More appropriately to the circumstances, however, it was located in one of the lesser developed areas of town; several strips of light industrial businesses sat on the opposite side of the street, but the land on either side of the warehouse itself was empty and barren and forgotten-looking except for a shed at the very back end of the northernmost property.

He twisted in his driver's seat, his hand dropping to his hip and the small-caliber handgun in the holster there, as a soft knock sounded on the glass of the window beside him, and then he growled and rolled the window down. "Shit, Dave! You know better than to sneak up on me like that!"

Dave Langer merely shrugged. "Jerry's in my car," he stated, jerking his nose across the street at the slightly worn-looking Dodge station wagon parked at the opposite curb. "It's eight o'clock, you know. Shouldn't…"

"He'll be here," Delgado stated with certainty. He watched as a black, late-model sedan of the sort driven by Centre officials pulled around a far corner and headed in their direction. "Go get Jerry. Here's our man."

Langer was a good man, Delgado reminded himself as he watched the black sedan pull sedately to a halt directly in front of the warehouse. They had been in the service together, assigned to the same operations many times and pulling each other's asses out of the fire more often than either of them could count. Langer was a master electrician, he was demolitions. Jerry – Jerry Fishbain, another fellow Special Ops graduate – was computers. Together the three of them had quietly pulled some of the most outrageous crimes on the eastern seaboard since their dishonorable discharge three years earlier. Who would have thought the little arms dealer to have been Navy NCIS? Just how someone as otherwise innocuous as Les Vickering would have found out about them, much less offer him and a team of his choosing a sizeable fortune to consider working for him, was anybody's guess.

It certainly was enough to make him curious.

Without paying a bit of attention to the other men slowly assembling on the street from the two aging cars, Vickering walked up to the warehouse door and punched at the security box before inserting a key into the deadbolt. He swung the door open, turned to look around – an open invitation to the others to come join him inside – and then vanished into the dark interior, leaving the door just ajar enough that he could be followed.

The others let Delgado take the lead; it was his party in the first place, after all. Delgado waited until they were on either side of him before pulling the heavy metal door open and peering inside. At the far end of a poorly lit and cavernous warehouse, a light shown brightly in a small office, and a quick exchanged glance among the three men had them spreading out to walk the length of the huge room cautiously.

"Time's wasting, gentlemen," came a loud voice from the office end of the building. "There's no trap here, no surveillance. If you want this gig, get your asses down here so I can explain what's needed. If you want to play spy-versus-spy, go waste someone else's time."

"You've got to admit," Delgado responded, keeping to the center line of the warehouse while his men scouted down either wall in line with him, "that we don't usually get calls like yours from accountants."

"Shows just how much you know about me," the loud voice scoffed. "Get down here, willya? There's nobody here, for God's sake!"

"All clear," Langer told him sotto voce, and Fishbain gave him the all-clear wave too.

Delgado jerked his nose in a "forward" gesture and strode purposefully toward the well-lit office. Inside, he could see Vickering with his butt braced against a desk overloaded with paperwork, his arms across his chest and his face a study in restrained impatience. The three men entered the warehouse and spread out in front of the man at careful distances from each other, a tactic that provided as much mutual protection and yet the safety of distance as physically possible in such a confined space.

"OK," he stated, tipping his head slightly up and to the side, "we're here. Talk."

"How many of you have been to Montana?" Vickering asked abruptly.

The three exchanged puzzled looks. "What the hell does that have to do with anything?" he asked sarcastically.

Vickering frowned. "There's a national park up near the Montana-Canadian border by the name of Glacier. In the middle of that park is a small installation, owned by the Centre…"

"The government let a corporation build a private facility on public land?" Langer asked with his slow Texan drawl. "How'd that one get through Congress?"

"The point is that this installation is your target, gentlemen."

Fishbain shook his head. "You already work for the Centre, asshole. You don't need us to get you in…"

Vickering almost laughed out loud. "I don't want _in_, asshole. I want it _gone_, and the prizes it holds transported to a place of MY choosing."

"Going freelance, eh?" Langer's succinct question came out before Delgado could ask much the same thing.

"Something like that," Vickering replied with a shrug. "None of your business _what_ I'm up to, though, is it?"

Delgado's eyes narrowed. Something about this deal smelled fishy. "Just what the hell is in this place anyway, that you would want us to destroy the place to get to?"

"Children," Vickering announced with very little inflection. "Three of them, as a matter of fact. Those three I want; anybody else there is disposable as collateral damage."

"Children?" Delgado's jaw had dropped.

"This facility houses several remarkable children ranging in ages from fifteen to five years of age. The three I want you to bring to me are the oldest of the ten: the fifteen year old, the fourteen year old and the twelve year old. When you leave Montana, I want the rest of them, and the facility itself, a pile of ashes in the middle of a forest." Vickering's voice had dropped to a deadly whisper. "I was told that you three were quite possibly the most talented team that money would buy, and that provided the money was sufficient, you'd take the job." His arms dropped to merely clasped hands in front of him. "Was I misinformed?"

The three turned to look at each other with Langer and Fishbain obviously leaving the leadership role to Delgado. Five million dollars – split three ways – was a very big enticement. God knew that Delgado, with his love of the ponies of Atlantic City and the loan sharks that swam around them, could use the money to keep his kneecaps intact. Delgado knew that Langer had had his eye on some property on the California coast for a long time, and Fishbain had long ago expressed an interest in setting up his own technology firm somewhere.

Killing kids wasn't a favorite activity, but they'd done it often enough for it not to be a huge impediment. Somewhere in the shared looks, the mutual decision became apparent. Delgado turned to Vickering. "How soon you want this done?"

"How soon can you do it?" the accountant retorted.

"Depends," Langer drawled and shrugged. "We'll need complete blueprints of the facility, including inside knowledge of where these kids will be located at any given hour of the day, _and_ a topographical map of the area. Any information about security arrangements, computer access, telephone… we'll need to know as much about that place as possible before we can even set a timetable."

Vickering had crossed his arms over his chest again. "I'll get you what you need."

"I don't get it, man," Fishbain shook his head, his face a study in disbelief. "Don't you work _for_ the Centre?"

The accountant's smile was chilling. "Only on paper, my friends." He turned to Delgado. "I'll be in touch when I have everything your friend here has asked for. Is there anything else you'll need before you can start?"

"A down-payment," Delgado stated and then watched the man's hands shift to clasped hands in front of him again, "as well as enough working capital to buy supplies and make other necessary arrangements for the duration of the job."

"How much?"

Delgado thought quickly. "Five hundred large should cover the expenses, so I want two and a half million in cash in small, unmarked bills only when I come to pick up the information from you next time. Half a mill of that is that expenses money I spoke of, and it's non-refundable. Upon delivery of your cargo, I'll expect the other three million, again, in cash."

"Do you have any idea how bulky two million in small bills is?" Vickering gaped at him.

Delgado smiled, contented to see the cocky accountant thrown even slightly off-balance. "You just leave the logistics of dealing with that to us and get us the cash and the info. We'll get your kids for you."

"For that price, you'd damned well better," Vickering threatened.

"By the way…"

"What?" The accountant's patience was beginning to wear thin.

"Boys, girls, what?"

"Hmm?"

"The kids you want; are they boys, girls, what?"

Vickering nodded, finally understanding. "Boys," he answered. "All of them are boys."

oOoOo

Horace Evanston watched the security panel as each of the living space doors was closed in sequence and then locked. This was his job: to make sure that the hidden treasure of the Centre stayed safely hidden and safely contained. But the job had never given him much peace of mind to go with the financial security it offered. Keeping children under lock and key paid extremely well but was a test of his faith in the Centre.

After all, it was the Centre who had given him the grant that had allowed him to finish his university training, earning him a Master's degree in child psychology with a minor in Education. It was the Centre that had hired him directly out of college, two weeks after he'd gotten married, and moved him into the Montana wilderness and this thoroughly modern facility. It was the Centre that kept giving him regular week-long vacations to whatever spot in the world he wished to travel and enough spending money while on vacation to be able to afford whatever he desired. The Centre had even helped pay for his father's lengthy stay in the convalescent home after a debilitating stroke and given him more than ample time when the old man had died to settle the estate.

The Centre had been good to him, and it was hard to harbor secret doubts about its agenda here in Montana. But even the philanthropic largess it had showered upon him and his branch of the Evanston family wasn't enough to make him completely blind to the reality of his job. These boys had done nothing, nothing but exist.

It was eerie the way the ten boys around whom this entire facility revolved looked as if they were identical twins separated only by approximately one year's time. Each and every one of them – from the four year old to the fifteen year old – had dark brown hair, huge and expressive dark brown eyes and a smirking smile that could make a person either want to chuckle or smack them. Each and every one of them was wicked-smart too, each of them being trained to excel in one specific area of expertise.

He'd watched the other day while the fifteen year old, called Cancer in all the official documents, had stood in front of a white board, dry-ink pen in hand, and lectured his trainer on the finer points of physics that pertained to the structural integrity of whatever they were discussing at the time. The way the equations and diagrams had spilled out of that hasty hand across that white metal surface had been almost frightening.

The fourteen year old, known as Leo, was now deeply involved in language acquisition. For the time being, he was being taught to exist purely in a Russian-language environment in order to handle the terms of a project _he _would be dealing with shortly. Evanston had watched that child bounce easily from French to Spanish and Portuguese, only to turn around and spout fluent German and Italian only moments later. Already the program was preparing to move forward into Japanese in little over a week, with Mandarin Chinese in the planning stages for three months hence.

The twelve year old was currently being drilled in logic, as well as inductive and deductive reasoning within controlled situations, each required in order to predict psychological and emotional outcomes with accuracy and speed. The eleven year old had recently been introduced to organic chemistry, and the ten year old to robotics. The nine year old had been brought up not only learning to read but to study the various different ways in which the written word could be encrypted. The eight year old…

Evanston shook his head to banish such thoughts. He was paid extremely well to keep, educate and direct the minds of these budding geniuses for the Centre, to keep them safe from contamination from the outside world, to keep them from discovery, and to keep them from understanding the very unique nature of their existence. The latter was the easy part; even Evanston himself didn't entirely understand the unique nature of their existence; he merely swallowed the directives and assurances of the Tower and tried to do as he was told in the most beneficial ways possible.

It was hard, however, to banish the image of the four year old presenting his current nanny with a hand-made card just that day, a card that demonstrated an already advanced understanding of the principles of art and design. The boy – barely more than a toddler – had been crushed when the trainer had simply crumpled the card, tossed it in the wastebasket, and pointed the boy back to the mathematics equations on the sides of the building blocks.

No! Evanston couldn't waste the slightest compassion on these children. They weren't real people, after all, but clones, he'd been told. Science projects. It was their mere existence that was the treasure of the Centre, evidence of a process that had been perfected and utilized to create intelligent life on demand. They were nothing but the property of the Centre and always would be.

He turned and handed his scan card to the sweeper standing patiently outside the observation booth, waiting to take his shift during the nighttime hours. Evanston would be glad to get away from this high-tech gulag for children. His wife and he lived in one of the small villages that existed within the boundaries of the wilderness that predated the establishment of Glacier as a national park. Sandi, whom he had met at the university while she'd been earning her elementary teaching credential, now ran a small day-care center for park employees. She didn't know the nature of his job; she probably wouldn't approve of it either, if she were to find out about it.

Evanston walked through the control room that doubled as his office and grabbed up his coat. Outside, he could see the light from the setting sun turning the granite peaks nearby a warm pinkish-orange, with the sky above tending toward a light lavender color with wisps of cloud marring its perfection. He took a deep breath of some of the freshest, cleanest air in the entire continental US and reminded himself to be thankful he wasn't stuck in some dead-end job in a rat's nest of a metropolis somewhere, turned into more of a number than an individual.

The Centre had saved him from that, and he couldn't allow himself to remember anything else.

oOoOo

William Raines sat in his office in the Centre Tower, an office that was dark except for the light from the lamp on his desk that shone down upon the latest balance sheet from Accounting. The skeletal man had studied, glared, and run his finger down ever column of numbers several times now, trying to discern just where there would be enough leeway to make the money stretch for a little while longer.

The truth was, there _wasn't_ enough money anymore. Discretionary and private accounts were long since liquidated, and the income hadn't matched the expenses for years now. There was barely enough money to make the latest round of payroll; and if the trend didn't begin to change, bankruptcy loomed in the very near future. Of course, the largest drain on the Centre's resources was Duplicity, but that situation was about to change. It was time to take the project out of the closet and put it to use bringing in profit for the Centre again, and the fact was that Raines didn't dare _not _bring it into full operation any longer.

Raines reached for the telephone and dialed, then waited for an answer.

"I want to speak to Mr. Olabi," he wheezed, checking the crystal clock on his desk and doing the math to make sure he was calling during African business hours.

"Mr. Olabi is in meeting until this afternoon," the musically accented voice on the other end of the line announced briskly. "May I take a message?"

"Tell him that the Centre is ready to go back into full operation, and he's invited to begin to send clients to Delaware at his earliest convenience."

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "_Full _operation?" came a deep and distrusting voice.

Raines smiled. He'd been around the block enough times with the Triumvirate to know that when key members of the consortium were in a meeting, another possible lesser candidate for any vacancy would monitor all incoming calls. If he couldn't speak to one of the three men who ran the Triumvirate with an iron hand, speaking to a second in command was the next best thing.

"To whom am I speaking?" he demanded back, then pulled in a noisy gasp of oxygen.

"Solo Indala," the deep voice replied with a touch of indignation. "And you did not answer my question."

"Yes, I said _full_ operation," Raines wheezed back at last. "We are once more in the position to offer the same kind of services we did when the Pretender Project was underway."

"Your record of late regarding promises made and not kept has been disturbing, Mr. Raines," Indala commented coldly. "How can the Triumvirate be sure that you are in the position to deliver on your promises this time?"

"Give me a chance to prove myself." Raines hated wheedling, but the number of clients standing in line to present their enigmatic problems to a Pretender capable of untangling them and finding answers had dwindled to practically nothing. He _needed_ the Triumvirate's confidence in the Centre to rekindle client interest, and business. "Surely there is a problem of the sort we used to handle for you that would do as a test case."

Again there was a pause on the end of the line. "Very well. I will confer with the Council and get back to you by the end of the workday here. But I warn you…" and the deep voice deepened threateningly, "…do not toy with us. Frankly, even I am privy to the fact that our Council has been advised on a regular basis to call in our loans to you now. If you wish to continue being able to do business…"

"You won't regret it, I swear." Raines struggled not to wheeze again as he pulled in another lungful of oxygen. "We only now are ready to move into full operation on this project. If we had moved sooner, we would have jeopardized the results and made years of research and development of the project a huge waste."

"Fax us the project details, and I'll present that as well as your proposal to the Council," Indala demanded coolly. "And we shall see what we shall see."

Raines' hands were shaking by the time he put the telephone down again. He was so close to pulling the Centre out of the hole left by Jarod's escape and then disruption of operations! Seventeen years of planning and a paranoid attention to security were about to pay off in a huge way! He wouldn't have just one Pretender working SIMs and earning the Centre money, in the long run, he'd have _ten_ of them – each with a highly specialized training in a specific area of inquiry. Only the oldest had been cross-trained in all of the sciences, much as Jarod had, in order to handle things while the others matured.

Even if they couldn't have Jarod back, his legacy would continue to profit the Centre well into the next century and beyond.

Raines rose slowly to his feet and pulled the prospectus file on Duplicity from its spot to the side of his blotter and walked over to the fax machine. He'd expected to be asked for the information, and frankly knew better than to expect cooperation from the Triumvirate without at least partially exposing his hand. The information would whet appetites without giving away _too_ much.

All he needed was one chance to prove that he could deliver as promised – just one – and the Centre was saved.


	4. Chapter 4 - Interesting Developments

Chapter 4 – Interesting Developments

Sydney gave Miss Parker a smile as she let him through her front door, and then gave an extra-wide smile to the boy who leapt to his feet. "Sydney!" Evan exclaimed and darted over to the old psychiatrist for his welcoming hug after Sydney had put his sack of groceries on the end table near the door. "Did you bring it? You promised…"

Sydney extended his car keys to the lad. "In the front seat. Be sure to lock up the car when you've got it out."

Miss Parker shook her head as her little brother scampered out the front door before it closed. "You spoil him, Sydney," she chided gently, even as she took his coat from him.

"He deserves to be spoiled, Parker," Sydney chided back unrepentantly, "just as you did at his age."

"My father would have disagreed with you," Miss Parker reminded him, even now unable to distance herself from calling Charles Parker her sire although she knew better.

"Yes, well, your father and I disagreed about many things, child-rearing being only one of them." Sydney retrieved his groceries and followed Miss Parker through her house and into the kitchen. "It's good to see that you're no more dedicated to his style of parental austerity than your mother was."

"Yes, but a microscope, Sydney? He's only…"

"Old enough to be curious, Parker," the psychiatrist replied without any signs of defensiveness. "Evan is an intelligent child, and even you have found it prudent to hire extra tutors to keep him from getting bored in his public school classroom. This microscope will only increase his ability to explore his world…"

"I suppose you intend to teach him how to use it?" she inquired, already knowing the answer. Sydney took great pleasure in sharing of his vast store of knowledge with Evan every chance he got, and even _she_ had begun to marvel at the tremendous amount of information the old man had assimilated over the years. No wonder he'd remained in charge of Jarod all those years: Sydney was no less a genius than his more celebrated former student. What had saved him from Jarod's fate, no doubt, was the fact that his genius was kept carefully understated and most definitely under-appreciated by the Centre hierarchy. No wonder Jarod had been such a successful Pretender. He'd been trained by one of the most successful Pretenders alive: the one the Centre never knew they had.

"I also ordered some pre-prepared slides for him to practice on," Sydney admitted, removing the wine from the paper sleeve and opening the drawer where she kept her corkscrew, "and a notebook in which to record his observations and drawings."

"God, you'd think he was a freshman biology student, rather than a ten year old boy," she commented brusquely. Evan had been nattering on all weekend about how Sydney was going to get him a _real_ microscope and teach him how to use it. His enthusiasm for the gift had made the idea of something other than what a normal boy would want seem less odious.

"He has the makings of a fine scientist, Parker, or doing exceedingly well in whatever endeavor he eventually puts his mind to as a career. His interests and curiosity should be encouraged, no matter where they lead him, and decent, professional technique taught to him right from the start." Sydney finished emptying his grocery sack and sniffed the air appreciatively. "Pot roast?"

"I haven't made it for a while," she defended her choice with a smile, "and I knew that both you and Evan tend to make pigs of yourselves when I do…"

"We do not…" Sydney began, only for his sentence to grind to a halt as Evan danced into the kitchen bearing the large box that Miss Parker now knew had been purchased for him online and shipped from Germany. The car keys he had borrowed were dangling precariously from a crooked forefinger held out from the rest, which Sydney retrieved and pocketed. "Did you remember to lock the car?"

"Yes, sir," Evan replied, dropping the keys into Sydney's waiting hand carefully without unbalancing his burden. "Can I open it now – _please_?" He turned to his sister. "_Please_, Sissy?"

"Oh…" Miss Parker couldn't refuse the imploring expression on her brother's face. "For a few minutes – but you have to clear the table for supper in…" she glanced up at the clock, "…a half hour."

"C'mon, Sydney!" Evan cried happily and deposited the box on the kitchen table with a thud – shoving the salt and pepper shakers and the napkin holder nearly on the floor in his excitement. "I want to see…"

"This is a delicate scientific instrument, Evan," the older man warned the boy even as he pulled the flaps of the box open, exposing the sheltering Styrofoam within. "You don't want to be dropping this or handling it roughly in any way." Miss Parker watched with no small amount of her own interest as he inserted stronger, longer fingers into the thin space between box and Styrofoam and exposed the polished wooden box within, as well as several smaller boxes nested in their own places nearby. "And you'll need to be extra careful with these – they're glass and will break easily…"

She turned back to preparing the potatoes for boiling and mashing, letting the sounds of a happy child and equally happy adult wash over her. This was the closest she had managed to come to feeling like she had a family to belong to in a very long time: since the death of her mother all those many years ago, as a matter of fact. Evan was growing up to be a boisterous but fairly polite and well-behaved child with amazingly few scars from his first lonely years in the Centre sublevels, and his progress gave her a feeling of accomplishment, knowing that she had been instrumental, if not key, to that. She and Sydney, that is.

She hadn't intended to let Sydney, whom she'd known for nearly her entire life, become such a large part of her private world. There was a small part of her that would never entirely forgive him for keeping his word to her mother not to tell her that the suicide she'd thought she'd witnessed was but an act of desperate escape. But then had come the death of Charles Parker over a storm-tossed nighttime Atlantic Ocean, the revelation of William Raines as probably being her sire in fact, not to mention the disappearance of her half-brother Ethan into the woodwork with Jarod over a year earlier. In all, these events had rocked her world and stripped her of everything she'd ever believed in.

Then she'd discovered Evan and what had become of the infant she'd helped bring into the world. At last she thought she'd found someone worth expending energy on, but Evan had turned out to be a much bigger and more challenging handful than she'd imagined. Raised in virtual isolation in the bowels of the Centre for the first few years of his life, the boy was completely unsocialized: loud, rude, and had a tendency to throw wild and violent temper tantrums when crossed. Unwilling to simply give up on him, she'd turned in desperation to the only person she knew she could count on to provide quality advice, and Sydney had come through for her as she'd never dreamed he would.

She had long since figured out that he had started to think of Evan as the grandchild he would never get from Nicholas. Sydney had never been able to develop anything but a distant relationship with a son from whom he'd been separated before the boy's birth. Nicholas had taken a long time to come to terms with the abrupt shift in his parentage, and never seemed to want to spend a great deal of time with his real father. He'd even held onto the name under which he'd been raised as a subtle hint to that fact. Although there had been a time when Sydney had gone to great lengths to protect Nicholas from Lyle's manipulation and agendas, Nicholas had never come to understand or sympathize with his father at all. Sydney had informed her at the time, under coercion when his plummeting mood betrayed his very private emotions - that he'd received a letter from Michelle, Nicholas' mother, informing him of Nicholas' already-accomplished marriage to a young woman he'd met in Quebec. A month later, she'd seen his disappointment grow even deeper when a letter from Nicholas himself established that neither he nor his new wife had any intention to have children.

Not a month later, however, she'd turned to him for help with Evan.

Being invited to be of open assistance in the raising of a child had made Sydney positively bloom in a paternal sense. He did spoil the boy, but it was a form of benign spoiling with an underlying current of discipline and ethical integrity as an example of behaviors approved of and practiced consistently by the adults around him. And, over time and despite her past issues with him, she'd grown fond of the old man herself when he'd started to turn a little of that paternal attention to her too. Once more – in what was fast becoming a habitual gesture – her fingers toyed with the stunning diamond and platinum lavaliere necklace he'd given her. She still marveled that he would have considered gifting her with something that had been his mother's, as if with the gift he'd adopted her into his family.

Their work had once kept them in near-constant contact; but with the hunt for Jarod being at a total standstill, their other tasks kept the two of them working on separate projects and only rarely conferring. That made the weekend time together with Evan all the more special to the both of them, for on weekends they could set aside Centre attitudes and agendas in order to just be ordinary people with a shared bond in the child they were raising together as best they could.

"Need help?" Sydney spoke suddenly from just behind her shoulder.

"Evan finished already?" she asked, and then glanced behind her to find the table at which they were going to eat cleared and Evan nowhere in sight. She looked up at the clock and discovered that the time she'd specified had passed during her musings, and the potatoes were already on the stove and boiling furiously. "Where is he?"

"I convinced him to set up on the coffee table instead of in here. I'd imagine he's still in there, practicing not getting a real good look at his own eye in the reflection from the eyepiece." Sydney didn't wait for an invitation, but reached over her shoulder for an overhead cupboard door so he could take down the plates they'd need for the meal.

She sighed and turned off the burner under the potatoes after she tested them and found them cooked. "It must have been a long week; I didn't' even realize how time had flown already."

"They're all long weeks, Parker," he commented wryly. "You know that."

"Any luck with going through Jarod's stuff?" she asked in passing, moving conveniently out of the way so that he could get to the eating silverware drawer while she drained the potatoes.

"Not a thing," he replied as he laid out three places at the table. "I've looked through that room so many times in the past few years, and nothing leaps out at me now as indicating a larger pattern of behavior than has occurred to me beforehand. Everything is just like a collection of junk: essentially meaningless in itself except that it points out the way in which Jarod has investigated his world and taken a hand at improving it where he could."

"Wonderful," Miss Parker grumbled. "Well, that's not going to help find him in the time allowed…"

"Parker," Sydney straightened and looked at her, "you know as well as I do that it was only a matter of time before Jarod disappeared for good. He'd always had the ability to put himself out of the Centre's reach, he'd just never chosen to do it before. We're not going to find him – not in a year, not in ten years – unless he WANTS to be found."

Storm-grey eyes in which a reluctant agreement hovered unexpressed caught and held the warm but apologetic chestnut gaze of the old psychiatrist. "Then we're going to need to look into which vaccinations we'll need prior to our trip to Africa, won't we." It wasn't a question.

Sydney shrugged in a uniquely European manner. "A year is a long time," he offered. "A lot can happen. Don't borrow trouble, Parker. We'll just do the best we can in the meantime, and pray that something intervenes between now and then that renders the African threat moot."

Miss Parker turned away to dump the boiled potatoes into a serving bowl. "From your lips to God's ears, Freud."

"Sissy! Look what I did!" Evan trotted into the kitchen with the notebook extended. "Sydney! Did I do it right?"

The two adults gazed down into the notebook and saw the very recognizable shapes of an amoeba and then exchanged knowing glances. Evan was a _very _quick learner, just as Sydney had said. Perhaps there had been a reason for his early servitude in the depths of the Centre, although neither of them really wanted to ponder the implications.

"Nice!" Miss Parker smiled down at him. "What do you think, Sydney?"

"Verrrry good, Evan!" Sydney purred at the boy, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs and then clapping the boy heartily on the shoulder. "Go turn the light off on the scope and wash up now, though. We're just about ready to eat."

oOoOo

Shinse Olabi looked up from his copy of the project prospectus that had been faxed from the Centre, his surprise at its contents evident. "I didn't think our Mr. Raines had it in him."

Ugo N'deka rubbed beneath his nose thoughtfully as he gazed at the elder member of the Council of Three from which the Triumvirate had taken its name. "This is an audacious plan, but one that shows more promise than almost anything else from the Centre of late."

Olabi glanced over at the third member of the Council, a middle-aged woman whose admittance to the Council had come seven years after the murder of her husband, who had presided over the Council with intimidation and uncanny savvy. Her eyes were narrowed, and it seemed she had yet to finish reading. "Lula," he called gently, "your thoughts?"

A graceful and carefully manicured forefinger stabbed into the air as she slowly flipped backwards through the pages of the prospectus, stopping at the balance sheet. "Have you looked – and I mean _really _looked – at the cost over-runs on this project? Ten individuals, eight of whom aren't even ready for use, housed in an isolated facility at a monstrous cost per year. Where has the Centre been pulling the funds to keep this not only progressing on schedule, but hidden all this time?"

N'deka shrugged. "It doesn't matter. What _does _matter is whether or not we wish to allow ourselves to provide the test that validates the expense over the years, or whether we just go ahead, call in our loans and watch the Centre fold in a month."

"I thought we'd already discussed this," Olabi frowned. "We were going to give the Centre six weeks more to prove that they could begin to function in the black again."

"That's my point entirely," Lula Mutumbo glared in turn at both men at the council table with her. "It's going to take more than six weeks to prove the profit-making potential of this scheme." The forefinger stabbed at the papers that now lay on the table in front of her. "You two know where my vote is. We've wasted enough time and capitol on the Centre. I say it's time to recoup our losses and look elsewhere for investment potential in the United States."

N'deka looked to Olabi, obviously ceding the next comments to him as nominal President of the Council. The older man took in a deep and heavy breath. "And you already know where my vote is as well. We have had a long and, until recently, very profitable relationship with past administrations of the Centre. This latest prospectus proves that they haven't entirely lost their edge when it comes to using the resources they have at hand to once more become a literal money-making machine with plenty of power and influence world-wide. I vote we take Mr. Raines' offer and give him the opportunity to prove this Duplicity to be bigger and better than the Pretender Project ever thought of being." Olabi gazed evenly at N'deka. "That leaves you with the deciding vote, Ugo."

"I know." N'deka stated wryly. "I'd expected as much."

"And…" Lula urged, "what do you say?"

"I can appreciate your concerns about the seemingly bottomless hole into which we've been pouring our money, Lula; and had this not crossed our desks, I'd be in agreement with you. I _have _been tending to want to cut our losses of late, and there have been whispers among some of our contacts in other similar organizations as to the real state of financial instability of the Centre. These whispers have recommended we get out now: that a quick divestiture and call-in of debts would be in our long-term best interests. But…" He lifted the prospectus. "…This is the kind of inspiration we used to admire from the Centre – the inspired use of genius to forge an entire new industry. Jarod was one individual – what Mr. Raines has here is an entire cadre, each highly trained and capable of decades of service. The profit from Jarod's work was spectacular. Can you imagine the levels of profit to be reached when there are _ten _Jarods fully functional?" He looked over at Lula apologetically. "I'm sorry. I must vote with Shinse to test this Duplicity's capabilities before calling for more drastic action."

Lula rose quickly. "I too have had my contacts whispering at me, Ugo, and they have been more than suggesting that the Centre is on its last legs. Frankly, from some of the information I've received, it is surprising that they still have the doors open. There is very literally no cash with which to pay bills in any of the Centre coffers."

"But if this works," Olabi interrupted her gently, "then that situation will quickly resolve itself."

"If, if, if," Lula scoffed with a disgusted wave of her hand. "My husband didn't build this consortium into one of the largest and most powerful global financial empires by betting on "if's.""

"He also didn't build a global financial empire by playing it safe," Olabi chided bitterly. "Your conservatism is to be admired, Lula, but to date, it hasn't profited the consortium in the least."

"It hasn't lost us hundreds of millions of dollars US trying to prop up a failing concern either," she retorted. "That's it! I wash my hands of this decision, and I'll take my concerns about any further losses to the consortium members themselves if the trend we've been seeing from the Centre doesn't very quickly do an about-face." She strode to the door, only whirling just as the muscular guard reached to open the door for her. "I have in mind a _much _more lucrative investment property; and when you gentlemen finally come to your senses, we can discuss it."

Neither man spoke a word until the door had shut behind her. Then: "She has the ear of a good percentage of the consortium members, you know." N'deka commented cautiously.

"But she's been nothing but negativity since taking over Adama's seat," Olabi reminded his colleague. "I see the potential for problems in her attitude. Have Siskele put a tap on her phone lines. I want to know exactly who she's talking to and what she's discussing."

N'deka gaped. "Spying on a fellow Council member?"

"We're protecting the Triumvirate from betrayal from within," Olabi stated dryly. "When all is said and done, our duty and loyalty should be to the consortium at large, not any one member of the Council. Call Siskele."

N'deka nodded. He didn't like it, this spying on one of their own; but then, these were unpredictable times. He'd call their Chief of Security the moment he got back to his own office.

oOoOo

Mr. Raines stared up into the face of his personal sweeper with a combination of shock and disgust. "You're sure about this?"

Willy shrugged. He pulled several silver discs from the breast pocket of his sports jacket and let them fall on top of the document that the skeletal Chairman had tossed down on the desk. "Here's the proof."

Watery blue eyes looked almost desperately for signs of duplicity but could find none. Willy had been loyal to him for well over a decade – seeing him through one trial or crisis after another – and Raines knew that if Willy felt the information important enough or explosive enough to interrupt the end of a quiet weekend at the lakeside cottage, it probably was. And sure enough, the information he'd been handed had been explosive.

Lyle, it seemed, was playing a dangerous game of double double-cross: selling information to rival crime syndicates and then writing lucrative contracts with both sides to supply them with arms and logistical strategy when the threat of violence between the two groups became inevitable. What was worse, however, was that Lyle was pocketing the profit from this venture – and a sizeable hunk of change it was – rather than doing the right thing and replenishing the General Fund of the Centre.

Raines could understand the need to make use of the information pool that had made the Centre a global power for decades. It was that same ocean of intelligence and information and secrets which had held so many of the Centre's creditors at bay lately. He himself had flat-out sold intelligence and then written a supply contract just a few years ago, when the Centre's access to liquid assets had dried up the first time. The Centre had profited enough from that little escapade with one of two rival syndicates squaring off in Miami to stave off a hostile takeover attempt from Monsanto. But for Lyle to sell information that didn't belong to him in the first place and then pocket the profits for himself without even offering the Tower a cut of the proceeds to sweeten the deal and avoid hard feelings was to take greed and personal agendas a step too far.

"Is that all of it?" Raines wheezed noisily. He'd have to change oxygen tanks very soon. The oxygen was getting thin from the plastic nasal cannula.

"No – not hardly." Willy again reached into his pocket and this time pulled out a set of photographs. "He's up to his old tricks again too." The photos fell on top of the DSA discs, and Raines used a forefinger to push them apart enough to look at them.

Wherever the pictures had been taken, the restaurant was fairly upscale and most likely not an inexpensive place to eat. Lyle sat at a far table alone, his attention obviously riveted on a lovely Asian woman who was also sitting at a table alone. Raines looked up in disgust. "I thought I told him that he'd have to curtail that kind of business just yesterday!"

"You know Lyle, sir," Willy sneered. "He went directly from your office to this restaurant in Baltimore, sir. And I checked his itinerary. He's been at this same place every Friday for the past few weeks."

"Who's the woman?"

"Rosalyn Chu, a securities analyst for Merrill Lynch."

"That's all we need…" Raines wheezed noisily, gasped in again in near-desperation and then pointed to the corner in which a stock of portable oxygen tanks were stored. "Bring me a new tank. This one's empty," he demanded soundlessly.

"What do you want me to do about him, sir? Mr. Lyle, I mean," Willy asked, immediately moving to do his master's bidding. The potential for being turned loose to take the Centre's revenge on someone so high in authority betraying the Centre was just too much to walk away from.

"Nothing," Raines' word was virtually inaudible while Willy quickly and expertly switched the canisters in the little cart and set the gauge to dispense just the right amount of life-giving gas. Raines breathed in noisily for several breaths which, for him, were deep gasps, and then opened those cold, blue eyes and stared at the sweeper. "I have a better idea than merely using the regular means to demonstrate the foolishness of his behavior to him." He started to grin. "What I have in mind will not only turn a profit for the Centre, but will even save the Africans money in the long run. After all this time, I think even _they _are getting tired of Lyle's antics."

"Yes, sir," Willy agreed, then cocked a head curiously. "What do you intend to do?"

"Where is Lyle now?" Raines demanded, not answering the question.

"Still in Baltimore, sir," was the quick reply.

"Have our people stick to him like glue. If he does anything, I want pictures. If he farts, I want to know what he had to eat."

"Yes, sir…" Willy waited. "But what DO you…"

"I'll see you in the office tomorrow," Raines announced dismissively. "You can let yourself out?"

"Yes, sir." Willy was disappointed; sometimes the irascible Centre Chairman would take him into his confidence and let him enjoy the sense of anticipation when a response was forthcoming, but evidently Mr. Raines intended to keep his plans to himself for the time being. "Good evening, sir."

Raines watched the tall and hulking sweeper move silently and gracefully through the front of the spacious cottage and finally through the front door, and then sighed when he was once more alone. Then he moved the photos aside, picked up the DSAs and stacked them carefully on top of the player he kept at the ready, and finally picked up the papers to read the particulars of the negotiations Lyle had led.

It had been a touch of genius to contact both the Tartini family and the Vostov syndicate of the Russian mob. Those two had been involved in a turf war over control of the better part of the New York waterfront business for more than three years. Until only very recently, that turf war had only had occasional skirmishes; but in the last three months, nearly eighteen bodies had been discovered with indications of their murders being gangland-related. It still wasn't clear if one side or the other was winning yet, but from the looks of Lyle's secret bank account in the Bahamas, both syndicates had been very generous in their reimbursements for whatever Lyle had seen fit to sell them. The man was now independently wealthy on a scale never seen before with any of the Centre elite.

Damn it!

Raines rose to his feet awkwardly, grabbing the handle of the oxygen tank cart and dragging it behind him to the liquor cabinet. Angrier than he'd been for a while, he poured himself a liberal dose of bourbon and downed it in one blazing gulp.

What a disappointment Lyle was turning out to be. Trained from the very beginning in what it meant to belong to and rule the Centre, Lyle had been the best prospect for future Chairman since Charles Parker himself rose to that position. And yet while Lyle had everything it took to manage the Centre, keeping the philosophies alive that had made the Centre what it was today, he'd been as much of a miserable failure at the simple task of recapturing an escaped Centre property as his twin had been. _NOW_ he'd had to screw it up even more by getting greedy on a personal level! Why couldn't he have waited with this stunt for six, eight months maybe?

Now plans to remedy the situation had to be put into motion early or Parker would be quick to smell a rat when Lyle suffered his "setback."

He dragged his oxygen back to the desk and sat down heavily, reaching for his Rolodex file as he did. It didn't take long for him to find the card he wanted, and he dialed the number with sure fingers.

"We have a problem," he announced to the voice that answered the call on the other end of the line without preamble. "We're going to need to move up the release date of your project to possibly the end of the week." When answering sputtering ensued, he merely shook his head. "I really don't care to hear about it. It looks like our timetable has been moved five months forward for us, and you're going to have to speed things up on your end to compensate."

"That's impossible!" Mr. Cox exploded into his ear. "I haven't had enough time…"

Raines' eyes glittered coldly. "Impossible or not, I want her ready to move as soon as possible. I don't want Jarod breathing down our necks after Miss Parker and Sydney are removed from the picture, do you?"

"Of course not!"

"Then get the girl ready. I'm going to need to put her into play within the next week or so." Raines wheezed in noisily, his upset at having his careful planning unbalanced making his heart beat faster.

Cox was obviously livid. "I can't be sure the programming will be complete by then… And the consequences of the technique being incomplete and failing at just the wrong moment could be disastrous."

"I don't care how you do it," Raines yelled and then pulled in a gasping breath. "We found her for you after Jarod's father took her away from Lyle, didn't we? We caught her again and gave her to you a month ago, when you said your process was ready, didn't we? Now you will do as you're instructed, or I'll find someone else who can do the job better. Is that clear?"

Raines slammed the telephone receiver down and settled back against the comfortable leather-covered cushions of his chair. Idiots and imbeciles! He was surrounded by idiots and imbeciles, all of them, with the biggest of the lot proving to be his heir apparent.

Well, that would change soon enough…

oOoOo

It was late, and Jerry O'Brien knew that he'd tripped over something very important; important enough that his canned spaghetti, warmed over in the microwave and dumped unceremoniously into a cereal bowl, had once more grown cold. It didn't matter. He'd already lost his appetite to his alarm and excitement.

He'd spent the last hour staring at the computer screen in disbelief, his eyes flicking quickly back and forth between two windowed spreadsheet pages. On the left was Miss Parker's personal spreadsheet detailing expenses, complete with receipt numbers, dates and explanations. On the right was the spreadsheet that was the "official" expense account tally for the Pretender Project of which Miss Parker was one nominal head.

Normally, considering that there were two project co-heads, Jerry had been expecting to find most of Miss Parker's entries from her expense sheet co-mingled with identifiably those of Mr. Lyle's. After all, this project had two separate teams with two separate set of expenses; one should expect to be able to use the personal expense sheet to pick and choose those entries from the unified account that belonged to the one. But that had not been the case here.

The "official" balance sheet showed none of Miss Parker's listed expenses – not a single one of them – nor did it use any of her documented receipt numbers to supposedly justify the expense account item. What was more, every entry on the "official" balance sheet was outlandishly overpriced. No wonder Mr. Raines, if this was what he was working from, had been determined to assign an auditor to the project overall; and no wonder both Mr. Lyle and Miss Parker had been livid. If either of them could be believed, then someone far enough up in authority as to have access to upper-level security had used their access to falsify the balance sheet, with the excess reimbursement money handed over prior to the "discovery" of this fraud going… where?

O'Brien frowned, hit the button to print out his findings and then closed out the two spreadsheets. He'd done what he could from home. In the morning he would present his evidence of file tampering to Mr. Raines and ask for help from the computer experts in uncovering who had had full access to the file. Then he'd call Vickering and ask for a routing for the reimbursement deposits. If either Mr. Lyle's or Miss Parker's accounts had been credited, it meant the private expense sheet of that individual was bogus and the culprit for the cost overruns had been discovered. But if neither account had been credited…

Money in this amount didn't simply vanish. If the reimbursement had been made, the money had had to have gone _some_where.

He took an absentminded bite of his spaghetti and then grimaced. Cold spaghetti! Ugh!

oOoOo

"Well, how did it go?"

Lula Mutumbo relaxed back into the comfortable chair at her desk, cradling her private cell phone against her ear. "It went as you predicted, Mr. McKenna," she sighed tiredly. "The minute Ugo N'deka got a whiff of this Duplicity, he was right back into the Centre's back pocket."

"I told you, he's been a fan of the Centre since Charles Parker arranged your husband's murder in order to keep N'deka from being ousted from his Council chair," Jim McKenna reminded her frankly. "He pretends to be a moderate, but he has benefited far too much at the Centre's hand to see through the smoke and mirrors."

"So what do we do now? If the Centre is as unstable as you say, my consortium stands to lose a good deal of its investment; which will mean we will be unable to proceed into a full partnership with the Eire Foundation…"

"Nonsense," McKenna brushed aside her warning with quiet confidence. "You are authorized to be a signatory in contracts, are you not?"

"Yes, but…"

"But nothing," he interrupted her, this time brusquely. "My Foundation is the best new property to have come your way in a good ten years, and you know it. I suggest that you fly over here to Philadelphia, and let's see how much of a working relationship we can put together without having to consult with your anachronistic cohorts. Let them cling to a sinking ship, while you are launching a new and seaworthy vessel."

"You're very sure of yourself," Lula commented in wary admiration.

"Yes, ma'am, I am." McKenna stated bluntly. "My organization is not now, nor has it ever been, financially over-extended. What we would be constructing would be a silent partnership, with the Triumvirate supplying new capital that will assist me in enlarging the scope of our profitable ventures."

"You have to admit that if Raines can pull off this Duplicity, the Centre will be in a powerful position to reclaim its financial stability in relatively short order," Lula warned him.

"Don't worry about Duplicity," McKenna replied, his voice once more brusque. "I have it on good authority that the project is doomed to failure in the very near future. All of that money will have been wasted, and the Centre will not survive long after that."

"That seems rather presumptuous…"

"I'm merely telling you the facts as I know them," McKenna countered. "Now, may I make reservations in your name at the Philadelphia Hilton, say for a week's stay in about three days?"

"I will need a cover story to satisfy my fellow Council members, should they grow curious…"

"Tell them the truth," McKenna suggested, a wicked note of mischief very clear in his voice. "Tell them you are investigating new investment possibilities and that you will be reporting on your findings on your return. They can hardly fault you when you aren't lying to them."

Lula's face broke into a pleased smile. "You are indeed a clever man, Mr. McKenna."

"Thank you, Mrs. Mutumbo. Please have your assistant call as soon as travel arrangements have been made, and I will be more than happy to take care of lodging reservations on this end in preparation for your visit."

The turbaned head nodded slowly. "Very well," Lula agreed finally. "You shall hear from my people by the end of the day tomorrow."

"I look forward to the beginning of a very lucrative business relationship for the both of us," McKenna told her with smooth persuasion. "Until we speak again, then."

Lula replaced her cell phone in her pocket and looked around at the walls of her office. To the best of her ability, she'd recreated the precise décor that had been in place in her husband Bolo "Big" Mutumbo's office at the time of his demise. It was a vivid reminder to those who worked her that she was continuing a legacy that had lapsed. Adama Okele had been a fool who had bartered the power of the Triumvirate against the wiles of the Centre and lost. _SHE _would not make the same mistake. The Centre was a cancer that was eating the Triumvirate. Bolo had seen that and had been taking steps to neutralize Charles Parker and his slimey associates, including Ugo N'deka, when a sniper had snuffed out his life prematurely.

She'd seen enough evidence that Parker and his associates – especially a particularly evil and diabolical second in command by the name of William Raines – had been behind the assassination. Jim McKenna had been very careful in providing her with that evidence, giving her not only forensics reports but eye witness testimony in the affair. She had no doubts as to the guilt of the Centre and so had no qualms in doing her part to try to hasten the demise of such an ill-begotten organization.

And yet Raines – the hither-to unknown brother of Charles Parker – had managed to squeak out of every little trap she'd laid for the Centre. He'd avoided assassination attempts and charges of stock manipulation, letting middle management figures take the fall for concepts and directives that had originated in his office.

But no more.

At least, not if McKenna could deliver on his assurance that Duplicity was the Achilles' Heel that would uproot the Centre at long last.

She reached for her office phone and summoned her personal assistant. "Book passage to Philadelphia for myself and sufficient staff to handle a several weeks' stay," she directed autocratically, "and then inform Mr. McKenna at the Eire foundation of the arrangements."

"Yes, ma'am," the assistant agreed immediately.

oOoOo

"Jarod, I've called you three times for lunch now…"

Jarod shook himself free of the meditative state that was required to achieve the clarity of mind necessary to do a SIM properly. "I'm sorry, Em… I was…"

Em put her hands on her hips and moved to stand directly in front of her brother as he sat on the edge of his bed amid photographs, diagrams, and pages of hasty scribbling. "I thought you already had this one worked out…"

Jarod didn't look her in the face as he pushed his lanky frame from the bed and stretched. He'd been hard at it since four that morning; he did need the break. "I thought I had too until I went there on Friday."

Em's dark eyes flashed with worry. "You're not going to be putting yourself into danger, are you?"

Jarod's equally dark chocolate yes flashed with mild irritation. "Every one of these Pretends has its share of risk, Em. This one is no exception."

"Mom and Dad are worried…"

"Mom and Dad always worry, and so do you. It doesn't change who I am or what I do, so let's just drop it, shall we?" Jarod frowned. "Look, I'm sorry I didn't hear you calling me. Can we just eat now?" He moved past his sister and walked to the door of the bedroom. "What's for lunch?"

"Jarod, whatever it is that you're planning to do is giving you fits. Do you know that you've had nightmares for the last two nights in a row?" Em followed him, a note of frustration in her voice.

"Of course I know I've had nightmares. I'm the one who lived through them," Jarod replied after a quick intake of breath and grounding technique keeping his own building frustration from catching fire too quickly.

"I don't mean to pry…"

"Then don't," Jarod snapped a little more crossly than he'd intended. "Look, Em, if putting up with me and the way I get when I'm involved in one of these Pretends is going to be too hard on you, I can always find another place…"

"Stop it, Jarod! Can't you see? You've become almost…" Em struggled for the words to express what she was seeing. "I remember when you first came to the farm, how you had such a hard time learning to just be yourself. You used to get angry when we'd ask questions about the Centre, and now you're getting angry in the same way when I even think of asking you anything about this escapade of yours…"

Jarod stopped, threw his head back and sighed loudly before turning to face her. "Then maybe you should stop asking me about my 'escapade,' whatcha think?" He scowled at her as he waited for her to move ahead of him. "Is there lunch, or were you just looking for an excuse to interrupt me?"

"Jarod!" Em was aghast.

Jarod sighed. The last thing he wanted to do at this ticklish stage of the Pretend was to have to work at balancing his home environment too. This was the place where he _had _to feel able to relax and concentrate. "I'm sorry, Em. Some variables were added to the situation on Friday, and I need to think things completely through again. I don't mean to bite your head off, but I can't explain…" He sighed again. "And frankly, you don't want to know."

"Yes, I do…" Em answered tersely, and then moved past him and into the kitchen. "But I guess I don't _need _to know."

"Em…" Jarod followed her, now beginning to feel guilty.

"No," she sniffed, moving a casserole from the stovetop to the hot pad on the table. "Maybe you're right, and I don't want to know anything about this Eire Foundation…"

Jarod stared. He hadn't told her that much. How had she found out… "What makes you think…"

"Jarod," she replied in exasperation. "I can read. Some of what you were sitting on had that name written all over. You told me on Thursday that you were going for an interview at the Foundation. It stands to reason that some of this attitude I'm seeing suddenly must have something to do with…"

"Please…" Jarod was feeling the same kind of pressure and antagonism toward his sister as had driven him from the farm. "I really need to just have you drop it, Em. I can't concentrate – I can't do my _job _– if I have to feel like I have to fight you off all the time too."

Em glared at him for a while, and then slipped into her spot at the table. "You're right," she said suddenly. "I'll drop it. Sit down and eat while it's hot, Jarod. You haven't eaten since last night."

Jarod eyed his sister warily as he pulled out his chair and folded his tall frame into it. She was giving up altogether too easily. None of the rest of his family had backed down from this particular fight before. Something was up.

Em refused to look into her brother's eye as she used the big spoon to ladle a generous portion of casserole onto his plate and handed it to him. The Eire Foundation, she repeated to herself, determined to touch base with a couple of her sources at the newspaper in the morning to see if there was any dirt to be scrabbled through in that direction.

Something had Jarod wound tighter than a drum and getting touchier by the hour… She intended to figure out just what that something was.

oOoOo

Lyle scowled as the lights in the Chu apartment remained lit. His time in Baltimore for this latest hunt was getting short, and he didn't really want to postpone it for another week.

There she was, silhouetted against the draperies of her living room window; and then, there _he _was! The tall man who had moved in on her Friday night was still in attendance and had been a non-stop companion for her for the entire weekend. The two shadows seemed to dance around each other for a moment and then suddenly merged.

Lyle growled and threw the Centre sedan into drive, squealing the tires as he peeled away from the curb. Damn it! How could he have been so wrong?

It wasn't fair! He had Raines on his ass telling him what he could and couldn't do anymore, he had a god-damned bean-counter on his ass looking in his pockets and his bank accounts, he had the buyer for Smith and Wesson on his ass for the money owed him for the latest shipment of handguns, handguns that had already been delivered to the Vostov Syndicate for which he was STILL awaiting payment himself. And now he had a damned lover-boy intruding on what should have been a singular moment of ecstasy.

All right, dammit, so the Chu bitch was safe for the time being. He could wait for her social life to take a nosedive again; obviously this guy was in and out of her life with long periods of inactivity between spates of non-stop companionship. Rosalyn Chu wasn't the only one out there who could interest him – surely he could find someone…

The clock on the dashboard told him he had three hours before he absolutely HAD to be on the road heading back to Blue Cove and servitude. Three hours…

A cold smile spread very slowly across his visage, and he pulled the car to a halt at the next stop sign and studied where he was. There was a place – down near the waterfront – where the ladies could be pretty and generally were less than picky about choosing their companion for an evening. He turned on the signal and steered the car around the corner to the right, thinking through the directions to the sector of town so as to find the most direct route.

By the time he turned the corner and saw the many scantily-clad women plying their ancient trade at intervals along the street, he'd made peace with this as his best option for the weekend's activity. And no sooner had he turned the corner than he saw her: her face heavily mascara'ed and powdered, but with classic Chinese features shining plainly through. He steered the car to the opposite side of the street over to in front of where she was standing and put the window down.

"Looking for a good time, Mister?" she asked in what could have been a Boston accent.

"Looking for you," Lyle answered, his grey-blue eyes twinkling. "How much?"

"Twenty gets you a quickie…"

"How much for an entire night?" Lyle demanded, allowing his need to show in order to spice the deal and make himself more credible as a customer.

The dark eyes sparkled in anticipation. "Eighty," was the quick answer.

"Get in." Lyle put the window up and leaned over to open the passenger door.

The girl hurried around the front of the car and into the passenger seat with a satisfied flounce. "You have good taste," she announced saucily.

"You have no idea," Lyle replied cryptically, making sure the locks on the passenger door were firmly locked and putting the car in gear again.

Maybe the evening wouldn't be an entire loss after all.

oOoOo

Nathaniel Cox was a patient man, most of the time.

He had to be. Raised in a mortuary, he'd long since learned the lesson regarding the fleeting nature of life; and then as a physician, learned that the best cures were the ones that kept disease from starting in the first place. His specialty – for the first decade of his practice, at any rate – had been in the field of fertility and obstetrics. There, the beginnings of his lessons on patience had unfolded. Life, the creation of it specifically, didn't happen according to schedules.

That same patience applied to his hobby of taxidermy, something that was as much a product of his fascination with certain elements of his father's profession as anything else. One couldn't rush the process of mounting the skin of an animal and making seem alive again. And, in the end, that same patience had served him _very _well during his latest tenure as researcher with the Centre. The process of creating potent mixtures of pharmaceuticals and psychological treatments to that would result in a predictable alteration of personality and malleability of purpose had required more patience than he'd ever needed before.

Unfortunately, it seemed that his master in the Tower had none of that patience in ready supply.

Cox roused himself from his comfortable couch in his office on SL-23 and flipped on a lamp so that he could see his way to his desk. There, he touched another small light fixture that could cast only the necessary illumination on the working surface, enough to be able to read the lastest observations submitted by his assistant on the progress of his current subject.

She was still in the sleep-deprivation-hallucinogen phase of the project. It wasn't easy turning a carefree, big-hearted person into a cold-blooded assassin. There was at least another day or so in this phase before the final audio-visual brainwashing could begin.

A week between where she was now and where she needed to be for deployment was to push the limits of the process. There would be no time to test and make sure the adjustments were complete and irreversible, no time to be sure that once she _was _released, she'd not only do as programmed but not stop until she had succeeded.

Still, it _was _Jarod that she was to be set after, and he _did _make a habit of getting in contact with her on a regular basis. Using Zoë as the means to remove Jarod as an irritant and liability to Centre security had been a stroke of genius.

Cox flipped a switch and the monitor screen on the wall blinked into life, showing the young woman in question tossing and turning and unable to find any peace to rest as the noise and blinking lights penetrated her concentration. He smiled suddenly, and grabbed a smaller legal pad to jot down his idea of using time distortion to hasten the process along at a rate that might – just _might _– give him the leeway he needed to make sure she would succeed at the task set for her.

Mr. Raines, unlike Mr. Parker, had little time for failure;and Cox knew that this would be his biggest test. He didn't dare fail, and therefore, didn't dare release her until he _knew _she wouldn't either.

oOoOo

"This is it?" Delgado opened the briefcase on the hood of the car and glanced quickly through the contents. It looked to be complete: there were the reduced copies of blueprints, schedules of staff and inmates, topological maps of the Montana wilderness area, and plenty of other information below that. He sighed and closed the briefcase once more with a snap – then turned back to Vickering. "What about the money?"

Now Vickering beckoned him to the back of his sedan and pointed into the trunk. Within were packed bag after bag of currency, marked by with Bank of America on the canvas. The trunk was full of the bags. "Its all here: two million in cash with the largest bills hundreds."

Delgado unzipped one of the bags at random and thumbed through a stack of hundred dollar bills making sure there was no newsprint or blank paper padding the bundle and cheating him of his pay. "That's not small denomination," Delgado scowled. "We were expecting fifties and twenties…"

"It's the best you can do without needing an armored truck to carry it all," Vickering countered testily. "Take it – and the briefcase – or leave it. I can always find someone else…"

"No…" Delgado could feel his heart beating just that much faster at the thought of all that money just sitting there, waiting for him to transfer it to the back end of his van. "Help me move it to my van."

Vickering leaned back against the back bumper of the sedan and folded his arms across his chest. "I brought you the money," he announced firmly. "You move it."

Delgado scowled. This accountant certainly could put on some stuck up airs. He stalked back to the driver's door of the van and started the vehicle up to move the back end closer to the trunk of the sedan. Contented that he could just snatch and toss now, he climbed down, opened the back doors of the van, and then spent the next few minutes discovering the real weight of cash bags stuffed to capacity with currency.

"When can your team move?" Vickering asked finally, once the trunk was once more free from its cargo.

"I'll be in touch," Delgado huffed at him, out of breath from the unexpected exertion.

"My people want this problem handled within the week," Vickering persisted. "Do you see any problem in meeting that goal?"

"I don't know," Delgado told him honestly. "Until the three of us have a chance to look over what you've given us, anything I say would be only speculation. However, if things are fairly straight-forward, you'll have your pile of ashes and your three kids within the week."

"You have my cell number…"

"You'll hear from us within twenty-four hours with a preliminary time schedule." Delgado didn't even pause to shake the man's hand again. "And you'll receive regular update calls to let you know of our progress."

"Good. For the money I just gave you, I expected at least as much."

Delgado's eyes narrowed as he turned just before climbing back into his van. "Just make sure that you have the rest of our money for when the job's done."

Vickering glowered back. "You just do what you've been paid to do, and let me worry about making sure the other half of your payment is ready for you when the time comes."

Delgado climbed back into the van and turned the key in the ignition. Something about the way Vickering was behaving was making the warning claxons sound off in the back of his mind. This was a high-profile job; and while the money seemed to be good, there were too many things that could go wrong both before and after. Not for the first time did he wonder why a Centre-employed accountant was paying him millions to destroy a Centre facility and steal away three individual children.

He threw the van in gear and sped away from the darkened corner. He wasn't being paid to understand, however, and he knew it. He was being paid to do a job.

And now was the time when he and his team were to deliver on their promises.


End file.
